New Citation Format

ACM has inaugurated a new reference format for its articles to more easily facilitate on-line publication. For example, the 13th article in volume 3 of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), which appears in the 2nd issue of the volume, posted online in May 2007, is referenced as follows.

• Smith, J. Q., Zeeker, J., and Lovelace, L. 2007. Reactive programming languages. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 3, 2, Article 13 (May 2007), 23 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1240233.1240236. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240233.1240236

Note that the date given in the reference is associated with the article rather than the issue. The publication date for each article is provided on each page of the article. This date corresponds to when the article is posted to the DL, not the date in which the print digest for the issue is subsequently distributed. The print issue itself no longer has a date associated with it, just an issue number. This change eliminates the conflation of article publication date and the date of print distribution.

For more on this change, see Evolving the ACM journal distribution program.