ACL reference format

What ACL expects

• Reference style: Author-year through natbib. acl.sty loads natbib and sets \bibliographystyle{acl_natbib} itself.
• Style file: \usepackage[review]{acl} for a review version, \usepackage{acl} for the final version, on the 11pt article class.
• DOIs: All references are required to contain DOIs when possible, or links to ACL Anthology pages as a second resort.
• Length: Long papers: 8 pages of content in review, 9 in the final version. Short papers: 4 and 5. References are unlimited in both.
• Required section: A section titled “Limitations” before the references. It does not count toward the page limit, and ARR desk-rejects papers without it.
• Review: Two-way anonymized. No author names or affiliations, and no self-references that reveal identity.

Setting up the bibliography

With the ACL style file you do not write a \bibliographystyle line. At the end of the document:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[review]{acl}
...
\bibliography{custom}

Keep acl_natbib.bst next to your .tex file. The kit also includes anthology.bib, the bibliography for the ACL Anthology.

Three references in acl_natbib.bst

1. Emily M. Bender and Alexander Koller. 2020. Climbing towards NLU: On meaning, form, and understanding in the age of data. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5185–5198. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.463
2. Mike Lewis, Yinhan Liu, Naman Goyal, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Omer Levy, Veselin Stoyanov, and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2020. BART: Denoising sequence-to-sequence pre-training for natural language generation, translation, and comprehension. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7871–7880. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.703
3. Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Tongshuang Wu, Carlos Guestrin, and Sameer Singh. 2020. Beyond accuracy: Behavioral testing of NLP models with CheckList. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4902–4912. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.442

Three ACL 2020 papers, produced by running acl_natbib.bst over a .bib file built from the Crossref record for each DOI. In the PDF the style turns the title into the DOI link; the link is written out here. Titles, authors, volumes and pages were checked against Crossref on 2026-10-01.

LaTeX template

The official kit is the acl-org/acl-style-files repository, also available as an Overleaf template linked from its README. Its README says authors may not modify the style files or use templates designed for other conferences.

Common mistakes

• Entries without a doi or url field. The formatting guidelines require a DOI where possible, or an Anthology link.
• Lost capitals. acl_natbib.bst lowercases titles, so “NLU”, “BART” and “CheckList” above only survive because they are in braces in the .bib entry.
• Leaving out the Limitations section. ARR desk-rejects papers without one.
• Self-references such as “We previously showed (Smith, 1991)”. ARR asks for “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991)”.

Check your .bib file

• BibTeX Validator (free) checks a .bib file for syntax errors and missing required fields.
• Citation Generator (free) builds IEEE, APA, MLA and Chicago citations from entry fields, in your browser.
• Reference Converter (free) converts between BibTeX, RIS and EndNote. The same converter is below.