KDD reference format

What KDD expects

• Reference style: ACM Reference Format, through the ACM template the call requires.
• Class: \documentclass[sigconf,anonymous,review]{acmart} is the recommended setting in the call.
• Length at submission: 8 content pages, followed by references and an optional appendix with no page limit.
• Length at camera-ready: 12 pages in total, of which 9 are content pages. References and appendix together are limited to 3 pages.
• Review: Double-blind. Refer to your own prior work in the third person.

Setting up the bibliography

The acmart package ships its own bibliography style, ACM-Reference-Format.bst. At the point where the reference list should appear:

\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}
\bibliography{refs}

ACM's reference page says to use a BibTeX (.bib) file with the ACM Reference Format .bst, and that ACM prefers full author names over initials. In-text citations are numbers in square brackets, such as [1] or [1, 2].

Three references in ACM Reference Format

1. Tianqi Chen and Carlos Guestrin. 2016. XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 785–794. https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939785
2. Aditya Grover and Jure Leskovec. 2016. node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 855–864. https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939754
3. Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, and Carlos Guestrin. 2016. “Why Should I Trust You?”: Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 1135–1144. https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939778

Produced by running ACM-Reference-Format.bst over a .bib file built from the Crossref record for each DOI. Titles, authors, volumes and pages were checked against Crossref on 2026-10-01.

LaTeX template

KDD uses the ACM Primary Article Template. Our ACM acmart template page has a compilable sigconf skeleton and explains the review and anonymous options.

Common mistakes

• Planning the camera-ready around unlimited references. At submission they are unlimited, but the published paper allows 3 pages for references and appendix together.
• Dropping the anonymous option, which leaves the author block visible in a double-blind submission.
• Abbreviating first names. ACM's reference page states a preference for full names, and ACM-Reference-Format prints whatever the author field holds.
• Leaving out the doi field. The style prints the DOI as a link when the field is present and prints nothing when it is absent, with no warning.

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.