ACM references and in-text citations from a DOI, ISBN, URL or title, with the rules explained. Export the list to Word.
Let’s cite!
Paste a DOI, ISBN, PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or just a title. Your list is saved in this browser, so you can close the tab and come back to it.
Formatted by citeproc-js © Frank Bennett, unmodified, under the CPAL — citeproc-js implements the Citation Style Language. Styles from the CSL project, CC BY-SA 3.0 (our copies).
Paste a DOI, an ISBN, a link or a title and the tool finds the publisher's own record for it and formats it in ACM — the numbered system used in computing research, ACM journals and ACM conference proceedings. The references entry and the in-text citation come together, and the rules are those of the ACM Reference Format (Association for Computing Machinery, current version on the ACM author site), published by the Association for Computing Machinery. The format is defined by ACM's article templates and has been stable since the 2017 template revision.
ACM's templates generate this format from BibTeX; the tool's BibTeX export gives you the same data to feed them.
Three steps, about twenty seconds a source.
A DOI, an ISBN, a PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or a title. ACM is already selected on this page. The tool works out what you pasted and asks the right catalogue — Crossref, OpenLibrary, PubMed, DataCite or Semantic Scholar — for the record.
Each source gets a card showing what the catalogue held and what the tool changed to fit ACM: a DOI reduced to its bare form, a page range tidied. Every change can be undone with one click if the record was right as it was.
Copy the list with its formatting into Word or Google Docs, or download a .docx with the numbering and spacing already set. BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON exports carry the same data into Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or LaTeX.
The rules the tool applies, from the ACM Reference Format (Association for Computing Machinery, current version on the ACM author site).
Six real sources — two journal articles, a book, a chapter, a web page and a conference paper — formatted by the same engine that runs the generator above. Nothing here was typed by hand, so what you see is what you get.
[1] AI Writing Assistant. Free AI Writing Tools: What Each Does and When to Use It. AI Writing Assistant. Retrieved September 18, 2026 from https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html
In text: [1]
[2] Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy. 2011. Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures. Science 333, 6051 (September 2011), 1878–1881. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1202775
In text, citing page 1880: [2:1880]
[3] H. Paul Grice. 1975. Logic and Conversation. In Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts, Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.). Academic Press, New York, 41–58.
In text, citing page 45: [3:45]
[4] Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler. 1991. Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias. Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, 1 (1991), 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.5.1.193
In text: [4]
[5] Thomas S. Kuhn. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th ed.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
In text, citing page 12: [5:12]
[6] Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. Attention Is All You Need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, 2017. Curran Associates, 5998–6008.
In text: [6]
Five errors markers see most often, and what the tool does about each.
ACM sorts the list alphabetically first and numbers it second. Adding a source can renumber every citation, which the tool handles for you.
ACM writes Scott A. Golder, not Golder, Scott A., in every position.
ACM sets article titles plain, in title case, followed by a period.
ACM writes the DOI as a full https://doi.org/ link at the end of the entry.
A journal reference gives the month with the year in parentheses after the issue: (September 2011).
If your handbook names one of these instead, its page opens the generator with that style selected.
IEEE is the other computing standard: numbers in citation order, initials before surnames, quotation marks around titles and doi: without a link. Open the IEEE page.
Human–computer interaction and information-science courses often ask for APA instead; ACM's reference format is for ACM venues. Open the APA page.
Yes. Every style, every source type and every export is free, with no account and no daily allowance, because the formatting runs in your browser rather than on our servers. Your list is saved in this browser and never sent to us.
The ACM Reference Format as published on the ACM author site and built into the ACM article templates. Conference templates use the same format.
A number in square brackets: [2]. The tool prints the in-text form under each reference; turn on the in-text switch above the list if it is hidden.
Paste the address and the tool reads the page's title, author, site name and date where the page declares them, then formats it. The ACM form of a web page with an organisation as author and no date is: [1] AI Writing Assistant. Free AI Writing Tools: What Each Does and When to Use It. AI Writing Assistant. Retrieved September 18, 2026 from https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html Check the author and date on the card — pages often leave them out, and the style has a rule for each case.
Yes. Your sources are stored as data, not as formatted text, so choosing another style in the picker re-formats the whole list at once — APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, or any of the 10,000 Citation Style Language styles the picker searches.
From the ACM Reference Format (Association for Computing Machinery, current version on the ACM author site), published by the Association for Computing Machinery, as encoded in the open Citation Style Language style the tool uses. ACM's templates generate this format from BibTeX; the tool's BibTeX export gives you the same data to feed them. Where your department's own guide differs on a detail, the department's guide is the one your marker reads.
Check the essay's grammar, tighten the wording, or summarise a source before you cite it. One plan covers every tool.
Each page opens the generator with that style already selected, shows what the tool prints for six real sources, and explains the style's rules. The picker above the list reaches more than 10,000 styles in all.
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