Patterns of bibliographic references in the ACM published papers

This paper analyzes the bibliographic references made by all papers published by ACM in 2006. Both an automatic classification of all references and a human classification of a random sample of them resulted that around 40% of the references are to conference proceedings papers, around 30% are to journal papers, and around 8% are to books. Among the other types of documents, standards and RFC correspond to 3% of the references, technical and other reports correspond to 4%, and other Web references to 3%. Among the documents cited at least 10 times by the 2006 ACM papers, 41% are conferences papers, 37 % are books, and 16% are journal papers.