A Practical Guide to Format Your References

This guide covers the BibTeX conventions we follow in all our papers. For the full writing guide, see the paper writing guide.

General rules

What are the non-negotiable formatting rules?

  • One entry per work; no duplicates.
  • Do not copy BibTeX entries from online sources; always reformat to this style.
  • Only keep necessary fields (no abstract, pages, or volume for conference papers).
  • Wrap titles in double braces {{...}} to preserve capitalization.
  • Author names: LastName, F. separated by and; use and others if more than 6 authors.

Citation key format

How to name your citation keys?

Use firstauthoryearfirstword, all lowercase:

  • vaswani2017attention
  • brown2020language
  • berdoz2026scalable

Source priority

Where to find the best citation?

  1. DOI page for peer-reviewed works (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, etc.)
  2. arXiv (if highly cited and not yet peer-reviewed)
  3. Author-specified citation (datasets/models)
  4. Website (last resort; include an access note)

Entry templates

What does each entry type look like?

Always include author, title, and year.

Conference paper

@inproceedings{smith2026scalable,
  title     = {{Scalable Methods for Distributed Learning}},
  author    = {Smith, J. and Doe, A.},
  booktitle = {{Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)}},
  year      = {2026}
}

All fields required.

Journal article

@article{smith2024scalable,
  title   = {{Scalable Methods for Distributed Learning}},
  author  = {Smith, J. and Doe, A.},
  journal = {{Journal Name}},
  volume  = {12},
  number  = {3},
  pages   = {101--115},
  year    = {2024}
}

Optional: volume, number, pages.

arXiv preprint

Use @misc, not @article.

@misc{smith2023scalable,
  title         = {{Scalable Methods for Distributed Learning}},
  author        = {Smith, J. and Doe, A.},
  year          = {2023},
  eprint        = {2301.01234},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv}
}

All fields required. If the bibliography style does not render the eprint field, you can exceptionally add note = {arXiv:2301.01234} to ensure the arXiv identifier appears in the reference list.

Book

@book{smith2020scalable,
  title     = {{Scalable Methods for Distributed Learning}},
  author    = {Smith, J. and Doe, A.},
  publisher = {{Publisher}},
  year      = {2020}
}

Optional: pages.

Website (last resort)

Only use when no doi, arXiv, or author-specified citation is available.

@misc{examplewebsite,
  title = {{Scalable Methods for Distributed Learning}},
  url   = {https://example.com},
  note  = {Accessed February 8, 2026}
}

Optional: author, year.

Common booktitle values for ML conferences

Full list of booktitle values
@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
  title     = {{Attention Is All You Need}},
  author    = {Vaswani, A. and Shazeer, N. and Parmar, N. and Uszkoreit, J. and Jones, L. and Gomez, A. and others},
  booktitle = {{Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)}},
  year      = {2017}
}

@inproceedings{author2025title,
  title     = {{Title of the Paper}},
  author    = {Author, A. and Bob, C.},
  booktitle = {{International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)}},
  year      = {2025}
}

@inproceedings{author2025title,
  title     = {{Title of the Paper}},
  author    = {Author, A. and Bob, C.},
  booktitle = {{International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)}},
  year      = {2025}
}

@inproceedings{author2025title,
  title     = {{Title of the Paper}},
  author    = {Author, A. and Bob, C.},
  booktitle = {{AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)}},
  year      = {2025}
}

@inproceedings{author2025title,
  title     = {{Title of the Paper}},
  author    = {Author, A. and Bob, C.},
  booktitle = {{International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)}},
  year      = {2025}
}

@inproceedings{author2025title,
  title     = {{Title of the Paper}},
  author    = {Author, A. and Bob, C.},
  booktitle = {{Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)}},
  year      = {2025}
}

@inproceedings{author2025title,
  title     = {{Title of the Paper}},
  author    = {Author, A. and Bob, C.},
  booktitle = {{Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)}},
  year      = {2025}
}

@inproceedings{author2025title,
  title     = {{Title of the Paper}},
  author    = {Author, A. and Bob, C.},
  booktitle = {{IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}},
  year      = {2025}
}

Additional resources

Where to find ready-made citations?