CHI reference format

What CHI expects

• Reference style: ACM Reference Format. CHI's formats page points to ACM's reference formatting guide. Word users with Zotero are told to pick the “ACM SIGCHI Proceedings” style.
• Class for review: \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart}, a single-column format.
• Class for publication: \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart}, two columns, after conditional acceptance.
• Length: 5,000 to 8,000 words is encouraged. Submissions above 12,000 words are desk-rejected unless the length is justified. The count excludes references, figure and table captions, and appendices. The abstract is 150 words or fewer.
• Review: Anonymized. Authors cite their own previous work in the third person and leave those citations unanonymized.

Setting up the bibliography

The acmart package ships its own bibliography style, ACM-Reference-Format.bst. At the point where the reference list should appear:

\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}
\bibliography{refs}

ACM's reference page says to use a BibTeX (.bib) file with the ACM Reference Format .bst, and that ACM prefers full author names over initials. In-text citations are numbers in square brackets, such as [1] or [1, 2].

Three references in ACM Reference Format

1. Saleema Amershi, Dan Weld, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Adam Fourney, Besmira Nushi, Penny Collisson, Jina Suh, Shamsi Iqbal, Paul N. Bennett, Kori Inkpen, Jaime Teevan, Ruth Kikin-Gil, and Eric Horvitz. 2019. Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300233
2. Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer. 1997. Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 234–241. https://doi.org/10.1145/258549.258715
3. Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich. 1990. Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 249–256. https://doi.org/10.1145/97243.97281

Produced by running ACM-Reference-Format.bst over a .bib file built from the Crossref record for each DOI. Titles, authors, volumes and pages were checked against Crossref on 2026-10-01.

LaTeX template

CHI uses the ACM Primary Article Template. Our ACM acmart template page has a compilable skeleton and explains the review and anonymous options. For CHI, change the class options to manuscript,review,anonymous for the submission.

Common mistakes

• Submitting in the two-column sigconf layout. CHI reviews in the single-column manuscript format, and its papers page says other templates may be desk-rejected.
• Anonymizing citations to your own work. CHI's policy is the opposite: keep them, and write about them in the third person.
• Abbreviating first names. ACM's reference page states a preference for full names, and ACM-Reference-Format prints whatever the author field holds.
• Leaving out the doi field. The style prints the DOI as a link when the field is present and prints nothing when it is absent, with no warning.

Check your .bib file

• BibTeX Validator (free) checks a .bib file for syntax errors and missing required fields.
• Citation Generator (free) builds IEEE, APA, MLA and Chicago citations from entry fields, in your browser.
• Reference Converter (free) converts between BibTeX, RIS and EndNote. The same converter is below.