The full record of computing research.
At a Glance
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Coverage | ACM’s own full-text journals and conference proceedings (500,000+ full-text articles), plus the ACM Guide to Computing Literature, a broader bibliographic index of the field |
| Access | institutional subscription (ACM Open is expanding open access) |
| Free alternative | arXiv (cs), DBLP for bibliographic metadata |
| Regional | global. |
Our Take
The ACM DL is the definitive home of computing research — ACM’s journals and its influential conference proceedings in full text, wrapped in the Guide to Computing Literature that indexes the wider field. For computer science it pairs naturally with IEEE Xplore, and the two together cover most of the discipline’s venues. It’s subscription-based, though ACM Open is moving content to open access. Use it as the primary CS index alongside IEEE Xplore; lean on DBLP for clean bibliographic metadata and arXiv for preprints.
Power Tips
- Use the ACM Guide to Computing Literature to reach beyond ACM’s own content into the wider field, then get clean citation metadata from DBLP
- pair ACM with IEEE Xplore so you cover both major computing publishers’ conference venues.
Alternatives & Complements
IEEE Xplore · arXiv · DBLP · Scopus.
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