ACM Reference Format: In-Text Citations and Reference Examples

ACM is a numbered style. A parenthetical citation is the reference number in square brackets, so [1]. Several at once are separated by commas inside one pair of brackets, so [1, 2]. So far this behaves much like IEEE.

The rule that catches people out is what happens when the citation is part of the sentence rather than appended to it. ACM does not bracket the author's name in that position; it brackets the year instead. ACM's own example is "So we see that Burando et al. [1999]...". Writers arriving from IEEE habitually write "Burando et al. [1]" here, and writers arriving from APA write "(Burando et al., 1999)". Neither is ACM.

• Parenthetical, appended to a statement: [1].
• Several sources at once: [1, 2], in one pair of brackets, comma separated.
• Named in the sentence: the author stays unbracketed and the year goes in brackets, as in Burando et al. [1999].
• Every in-text citation needs a matching entry in the reference list.

An ACM reference leads with the authors, then the year, then the title, then the container, then the location details, then the DOI. The year sitting second, immediately after the authors, is the clearest visual difference from IEEE, where the date sits near the end.

ACM asks for full author names wherever they are available, rather than initials. This is stated directly in ACM's reference formatting guidance and is the second most common difference from IEEE output, which abbreviates given names.

1. List every author with full given names where the source supplies them. Do not reduce them to initials.
2. Place the publication year immediately after the author list, followed by a full stop.
3. Give the title as published, then the container: the journal, the proceedings, or the publisher.
4. Add the volume, issue, month in parentheses, and page range or article number as the source type requires.
5. Finish with the DOI written as a complete https://doi.org/ URL when one exists.

The patterns below follow ACM's published examples. What changes between them is the container and the location detail; the author, year, and title opening stays constant.

• Paginated journal article: authors. Year. Title. Journal abbreviation volume, issue (Month Year), page range. DOI.
• Article-numbered journal article: the article number and a page count replace the page range, as in Article 5 (April 2007), 50 pages.
• Conference proceedings: In Proceedings of the full conference name (ACRONYM 'YY), dates, location. Publisher, city, pages. DOI.
• Whole book: authors. Year. Title (edition). Publisher, city.
• Chapter in an edited book: the chapter authors and title, then In Book Title, the editors marked (Eds.), publisher, page range.
• Doctoral dissertation or master's thesis: label it Ph.D. Dissertation or Master's thesis, then the awarding institution and location.
• Technical report: the report number and issuing institution take the container position.
• arXiv preprint: authors. Year. Title. arXiv:IDENTIFIER. Retrieved from the abstract URL.
• Web resource: authors or organisation. Year. Title. (Month Year). Retrieved DATE from URL. ACM notes the site year can usually be found in the page footer or by inspecting the page source.

Both styles number their references and both bracket the number in text, which is why manuscripts get submitted to ACM venues in IEEE format and come back for reformatting. The differences are systematic rather than cosmetic, and a reference record carrying the right fields can be rendered either way without retyping.

• Author names: ACM prefers full given names. IEEE uses initials.
• Year position: ACM puts it second, straight after the authors. IEEE puts it near the end of the entry.
• Title case: ACM's examples follow the published title. IEEE lowercases article titles in its reference patterns.
• DOI: ACM writes the complete https://doi.org/ URL. IEEE commonly labels it doi: followed by the identifier.
• Sentence citations: ACM brackets the year after an unbracketed author name. IEEE keeps the bracketed number regardless of position.

ACM publishes the acmart document class along with its own bibliography style, and directs authors to use a .bib file with the ACM Reference Format .bst so that references need minimal hand editing. Building the bibliography from records rather than typing entries is what keeps a submission compliant when the venue changes.

Rivul AI's BibTeX tools produce the record; the ACM style file decides how it prints. The two jobs are separate, and conflating them is the usual reason a reference list looks wrong despite correct underlying data.

1. Collect each source as a BibTeX entry with full author names, the year, the title, and the DOI.
2. Keep the entries in a .bib file rather than pasting formatted references into the manuscript.
3. Use the acmart class with the ACM Reference Format bibliography style for the venue you are submitting to.
4. Build once early with placeholder content, so a template problem surfaces in week one rather than the night before the deadline.
5. Check the rendered list against the source records, because a correctly styled reference to wrong metadata is still wrong.