Have only 1st Initial of authors first name in ACM bibliography

drewmcm
Hi everyone,
Just wondering if anybody else knows how to only have the first initial of the author's name in the bibliography when using ACM referencing style? This should be followed by the title, journal/book, volume/chapter, year, page

Here are two examples of what i need:
[7] E. Frid. Accessible Digital Musical Instruments—A Review of Musical Interfaces in Inclusive Music Practice. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 3, 3, 2019, 57.

[9] J. Harrison, A. Chamberlain, and A.P. McPherson. Accessible Instruments in the Wild: Engaging with a Community of Learning-Disabled Musicians. In Proceedings of CHI EA '19. ACM Press, New York, NY, 2019, 1-6.

At the moment, I I get the entire first name. And so have to manually edit each reference in the bibliography afterwards. He is an example of what I'm getting:
[7] Emma Frid. 2019. Accessible Digital Musical Instruments—A Review of Musical Interfaces in Inclusive Music Practice. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 3, 3 (September 2019), 57.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, if there is an option available. If not, is it something that could be developed somehow?

Thanks a lot
Drew
  • bwiernik
    The ACM style is written to initialize names already. Check that you have names entered in two-field mode in your library rather than in one-field mode (that is, as Frid | Emma, rather than as “Emma Frid”)
  • drewmcm
    thank you for your reply Bwiernik,
    yes, as far as I can see everything has been entered in two field mode

    so not sure why it’s giving me full names. I’ve also noticed that the styles don’t fit the particular style of the journal I submit for. Which asks for the year published at the end. Something else that seems to be in the wrong place for this particular journal.

    I see that you can edit using the code from anything downloaded from the repository, and I had a go at that. But I am so terrible at coding I didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t make it work. So I had to give up after a good few hours

    here is what I’m getting using ACM transactions on computing systems
    [1]
    Emma Frid. 2018. Accessible Digital Musical Instruments - a Survey of Inclusive Instruments Presented at the NIME, SMC and ICMC Conferences. August 04, 2018. . Retrieved February 8, 2024 from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Accessible-Digital-Musical-Instruments-a-Survey-of-Frid/c9d7f9dcb6c106c0ca40cbd22bd9202a95cf561c

    and here is what they require:
    [10] E. Frid. Accessible digital musical instruments—a review of musical interfaces in inclusive music practice. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 3(3):57, 2019.

    it’s a bit annoying, that they seem to be unique… Or are they? Does anyone else require referencing this way?

    thanks for all your help
  • damnation
    Our ACM style (association-for-computing-machinery.csl) does not initalise author names. That's by design and as required by ACM: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/reference-formatting

    We have a bunch of other ACM styles. Can you check those?
    https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=ACM&dependent=0

    Please link to the guidelines of the journal you're mentioning. We have a style for said journal on the repository as a dependent style of the above mentioned acm.csl.
  • drewmcm
    thanks for your reply. Sorry there isn’t a link as such to send you to the guidelines. However below is what’s in the template they ask us to use - hopefully this gives you some idea. I’ve gone through I think all the ACM referencing options in Zotero, and I can’t seem to get one that suits for some reason - let me know if you do have any other thoughts, thanks so much

    3.5 References and Citations
    Footnotes should be Times New Roman 9-point, and justified to the full width of the column.
    Use the standard Communications of the ACM format for references – that is, a numbered list at the end of the article, ordered alphabetically by first author, and referenced by numbers in brackets [1]. See the examples of citations at the end of this document. Within this template file, use the style named references for the text of your citation.
    The references are also in 9 pt., but that section (see Section 7) is ragged right. References should be published materials accessible to the public. Internal technical reports may be cited only if they are easily accessible (i.e. you can give the address to obtain the report within your citation) and may be obtained by any reader. Proprietary information may not be cited. Private communications should be acknowledged, not referenced (e.g., “[Robertson, personal communication]”).


    10. REFERENCES
    [1] B. Bowman, S.K. Debray, and L. L. Peterson. Reasoning about naming systems. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 15, 5 (Nov. 1993), 795-825.
    [2] W. Ding, and G. Marchionini. A Study on Video Browsing Strategies. Technical Report UMIACS-TR-97-40, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 1997.
    [3] B. Fröhlich and J. Plate. The cubic mouse: a new device for three-dimensional iput. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems
    (CHI ’00) (The Hague, The Netherlands, April 1-6, 2000). ACM Press, New York, NY, 2000, 526-531.
    [4] L. Lamport. LaTeX User’s Guide and Document Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1986.
    [5] M.L. Sannella. Constraint Satisfaction and Debugging for Interactive User Interfaces. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 1994.

  • damnation
    edited 16 days ago
    Looking at a current paper of TOCS that clearly shows the ACM style:
    https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3643029

    Was this something an editor at the journal told you or you are basing on something else?
  • drewmcm
    it’s a requirement from the journal, and stipulated in their template. And my supervisor f my PhD who has had a lot to do with them says it has to be this way -as above.

    i’m not sure if anybody else is doing or requiring their referencing that way?
  • damnation
    Where does this "template" come from? Official documentation from them?
    Why does it then contradict their published papers?
  • poettli
    edited 15 days ago
    Edit: Correct template

    https://github.com/NIME-conference/nime-template/releases/download/v2024.12.02/nime-papers-template.docx
  • drewmcm
    The team plate is the official document from them, that they have for us to download to use to write our articles to submit for this particular addition and conference

    actually, the thing I think I should do at this stage is ask for more clarity from NIME on the formatting of referencing in the bibliography and mention the issue that I am struggling with using Zotero, and that their style doesn’t seem to match others available.

    Because as you pointed out, it does all seem a bit confusing.

    if I was better at coding, and could understand the Zotero coding, I could edit the style to suit. However I spent a good number of hours trying to do that yesterday and not understanding what I was doing couldn’t make it work unfortunately

    thanks everyone for your feedback. I’ll let you know if I make progress, or let me know if you have any other thoughts

    Thanks again
  • drewmcm
    edited 15 days ago
    I've even tried using AI to help adjust the code - it almost gets it right, Just can't seem to get the initials and the last names in the order I nee no matter how often I reprompt it to change/fix. Not sure how to share the the code it generated as it doesn;t seem I can cut and paste here
  • drewmcm
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>


    Custom Style
    http://www.zotero.org/styles/custom-style


    Your Name
    your.email@example.com




    2025-02-06T00:00:00+00:00
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License
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