ICLR reference format

What ICLR expects

• Reference style: Author-year citations through natbib, listed alphabetically by author. The example paper says any reference format is acceptable as long as it is used consistently.
• BibTeX style: iclr2027_conference.bst in the current kit; the file name changes with the year.
• Style file: \usepackage{iclr2027_conference,times}. Uncomment \iclrfinalcopy for the camera-ready only.
• Length: The ICLR 2026 author guide set 9 pages of main text at submission and 10 for the camera-ready, with unlimited pages for references.
• Review: Double blind. A paper that reveals author identity in the main text or supplementary material is desk rejected.

Setting up the bibliography

From the example paper in the iclr2027 kit, at the end of the document:

\bibliography{iclr2027_conference}
\bibliographystyle{iclr2027_conference}

Replace the \bibliography argument with the name of your .bib file and keep the style line as it is. Use \citet and \citep from natbib.

Three references in iclr2027_conference.bst

1. Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. Deep residual learning for image recognition. In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 770–778. IEEE, 2016. doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.90. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90
2. Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber. Long short-term memory. Neural Computation, 9(8):1735–1780, 1997. doi: 10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735. https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735
3. Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553):436–444, 2015. doi: 10.1038/nature14539. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539

ICLR papers are published on OpenReview without Crossref DOIs, so these are three papers ICLR submissions commonly cite. They were produced by running iclr2027_conference.bst over a .bib file built from the Crossref record for each DOI. The link after each entry is added here for checking. Titles, authors, volumes and pages were checked against Crossref on 2026-10-01.

LaTeX template

ICLR publishes its kit in the ICLR Master-Template repository. The repository held iclr2027.zip when this page was checked, with the .sty, .bst, .bib and example .tex.

Common mistakes

• The title is lowercased. The ICLR .bst converts article titles to sentence case, as in “Long short-term memory” above, so protect acronyms and proper names with braces in the .bib entry.
• Leaving \iclrfinalcopy on in a submission, which prints the author names.
• Citing your own arXiv paper in the first person. The 2026 guide says related arXiv papers by the same authors do not break anonymity if they are cited in the third person.
• Assuming last year's page limit. The 9 and 10 page figures are from the 2026 guide; the 2027 guide was not yet published when this page was checked.

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.
• Paper Review with the Journal Pack checks a manuscript against the submission rules of 25 venues, ICLR among them.