ACMElike

Acmelike is an informal adjective used to describe material, practices, or tooling that resemble the conventions associated with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The term is typically applied in contexts relating to academic publishing, digital libraries, and technical documentation, where ACM's style conventions—such as structured abstracts, formal reference formatting, and two-column layouts—serve as a point of reference. The word is formed by combining ACM with the suffix -like, and it is not an official designation of any standard body; rather, it signals alignment with widely recognized ACM norms rather than formal affiliation.

Within scholarly publishing, acmelike manuscripts or submissions refer to documents prepared using ACM publication templates (for example, the LaTeX class acmart) and the ACM Reference Format bibliography style. In this usage, authors may describe a paper as acmelike if it follows the same paragraph structure, figure placement, citation style, and metadata requirements typical of ACM venues, even if the work is not submitted to an ACM conference or journal.

Acmelike also appears in software development and technical documentation to denote adherence to ACM-inspired practices, such as rigorous documentation, modular design, clear API references, and reproducible experiments in computational research. Tools and templates labeled acmelike encourage consistency with ACM's emphasis on replicable results and accessible, well-structured content.

It is primarily an informal descriptor rather than a formal standard. The term can vary in meaning by community and context, and its precise implications depend on the speaker. Related topics include the ACM and its publication templates, the acmart LaTeX class, and the ACM Reference Format.