Chapter 7: Bibliographies, Citations and Links

7.1 The model

1. You keep references in a .bib file: a database of entries, each with a citation key.
2. In the text you write \cite{key}.
3. A tool (BibTeX or Biber) pulls out only the cited entries, formats them in the required style, and writes main.bbl.
4. LaTeX prints the bibliography where you write \bibliography{refs} (or \printbibliography).

You never format a reference by hand. The venue’s style decides “Smith et al. (2020)” vs “[12]”, the order, abbreviations, and so on.

7.2 A .bib file

@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
  title     = {Attention Is All You Need},
  author    = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and Uszkoreit, Jakob
               and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N. and Kaiser, {\L}ukasz and Polosukhin, Illia},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume    = {30},
  year      = {2017}
}

@article{lecun2015deep,
  title   = {Deep Learning},
  author  = {LeCun, Yann and Bengio, Yoshua and Hinton, Geoffrey},
  journal = {Nature},
  volume  = {521},
  number  = {7553},
  pages   = {436--444},
  year    = {2015},
  doi     = {10.1038/nature14539}
}

@misc{touvron2023llama,
  title         = {{LLaMA}: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models},
  author        = {Touvron, Hugo and others},
  year          = {2023},
  eprint        = {2302.13971},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.CL}
}

@book{goodfellow2016deep,
  title     = {Deep Learning},
  author    = {Goodfellow, Ian and Bengio, Yoshua and Courville, Aaron},
  publisher = {MIT Press},
  year      = {2016},
  url       = {https://www.deeplearningbook.org}
}

Entry types you’ll use: @inproceedings (conference papers, which most ML papers are), @article (journals), @misc (arXiv preprints, websites, software), @book, @phdthesis, @techreport, @incollection.

Gotchas:

• Authors: separate with and (never commas between people). Last, First is safest. and others → “et al.”.
• Capitalization: many styles lowercase titles (“Bert: pre-training…”). Protect capitals with braces: {BERT}, {ImageNet}, {G}aussian.
• Special characters: {\"o} for ö, {\L} for Ł, {\'e} for é. UTF-8 works with Biber; with BibTeX it mostly works but braces are safest.
• Keys: pick a scheme like authorYEARfirstword (vaswani2017attention, which is Google Scholar’s scheme). Keys are case-sensitive.
• Duplicates: the same paper under two keys gives a duplicate reference. Keep one .bib per paper, or a carefully curated master file.

7.3 Getting good entries (don’t type them)

Cite the published version when a paper appeared at a venue (NeurIPS, ICLR, …), not the arXiv preprint. Reviewers notice. Tools like rebiber (GitHub) automatically replace arXiv entries with their published versions.

7.4 Two systems: BibTeX + natbib vs BibLaTeX + Biber

For ML papers: use BibTeX + natbib, because that’s what the templates use. Use BibLaTeX for theses, books, or when you control the format.

BibTeX + natbib setup

\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}     % or [authoryear] (NeurIPS/ICML templates set this up)
...
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}     % style: plainnat, abbrvnat, unsrtnat, or the venue's .bst
\bibliography{refs}              % refs.bib (no extension); place where the list should appear

Common .bst styles: plain (sorted, numeric), unsrt (order of citation), alpha ([Knu84]), abbrv; the *nat versions work with natbib. Venues ship their own (icml2026.bst, iclr2026_conference.bst, IEEEtran.bst, ACM-Reference-Format.bst).

BibLaTeX setup (for reference)

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=authoryear, maxcitenames=2]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{refs.bib}        % WITH extension
...
\printbibliography

Styles: numeric, authoryear, alphabetic, ieee, apa, nature, chem-acs, phys, and more. Commands: \textcite{} ≈ \citet{}, \parencite{} ≈ \citep{}, \autocite{}.

7.5 Citation commands (natbib)

This is the part you’ll type a thousand times.

Style rule: a citation is not a noun. Write “Transformers \citep{vaswani2017attention} use attention” or “\citet{vaswani2017attention} introduced…”, and never “In \citep{x}, they show…”.

Use ~ to avoid a line break before numeric citations: Transformers~\cite{x}.

7.6 hyperref: clickable everything

\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
  colorlinks=true,
  linkcolor=blue,      % internal links (sections, equations, figures)
  citecolor=blue,      % citations
  urlcolor=magenta,    % URLs
  pdftitle={My Paper},
  pdfauthor={Ada Lovelace},
}

• Makes \ref, \cite, footnotes and table-of-contents entries clickable, and adds PDF bookmarks.
• \url{https://github.com/me/repo} (breaks nicely across lines), \href{https://...}{text}.
• Load hyperref late, after most other packages. Exceptions that go after it: cleveref, algorithm-related fixes, and a few others.
• Some templates already load it (ICML does). Don’t load it again with conflicting options. Use \hypersetup instead.
• For anonymous submissions, check that pdfauthor metadata doesn’t contain your name.

7.7 cleveref: the last piece

\usepackage[capitalize,noabbrev]{cleveref}   % after hyperref

\cref{fig:arch}            % Figure 1
\cref{tab:main}            % Table 2
\cref{eq:loss}             % Equation (3)   (Eq. (3) without noabbrev)
\cref{sec:method}          % Section 3
\cref{app:proofs}          % Appendix A
\cref{thm:main,lem:aux}    % Theorem 1 and Lemma 2
\Cref{...}                 % capitalized at the start of a sentence

% customize names
\crefname{assumption}{Assumption}{Assumptions}
\crefname{algorithm}{Algorithm}{Algorithms}
\crefname{equation}{Eq.}{Eqs.}        % if you prefer "Eq. (3)"

The [capitalize] option makes \cref always capitalized, which is common style in ML papers.

7.8 A complete minimal example

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage[capitalize,noabbrev]{cleveref}
\begin{document}

\section{Introduction}\label{sec:intro}
\citet{vaswani2017attention} proposed the Transformer.
Deep learning has many applications~\citep{lecun2015deep,goodfellow2016deep}.
We revisit this in \cref{sec:intro}.

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{refs}
\end{document}

Build: latexmk -pdf main.tex (or Overleaf, which runs BibTeX automatically).

7.9 Troubleshooting citations

7.10 Key takeaways

• One .bib file, entries from DBLP/Scholar/Zotero, published versions preferred, {Braces} for capitals.
• ML templates: BibTeX + natbib + the venue’s .bst. Know \citet vs \citep.
• hyperref late, cleveref after it, \cref everywhere.