Springer LNCS reference format

What Springer LNCS expects

• Reference style: Citations by number in brackets, not superscript: [9] for one, [4-6, 9] for several. The list may be in alphabetical order (preferred) or in order of citation.
• BibTeX style: splncs04.bst, which sorts alphabetically.
• Class: \documentclass[runningheads]{llncs} in Springer's sample paper.
• DOIs: Springer strongly encourages DOIs in references and adds missing ones during production.
• Length and review: Set by each conference, not by the series. Check the call for papers of the conference you are submitting to.

Setting up the bibliography

From Springer's sample paper, in place of its hand-written thebibliography block:

\bibliographystyle{splncs04}
\bibliography{mybibliography}

Both llncs.cls and splncs04.bst are in Springer's proceedings LaTeX package and on CTAN as the llncs package.

Three references in splncs04.bst

1. Dwork, C.: Differential privacy. In: Automata, Languages and Programming. pp. 1–12. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/11787006_1
2. Lin, T.Y., Maire, M., Belongie, S., Hays, J., Perona, P., Ramanan, D., Dollár, P., Zitnick, C.L.: Microsoft COCO: Common objects in context. In: Computer Vision – ECCV 2014. pp. 740–755. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer International Publishing (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10602-1_48
3. Ronneberger, O., Fischer, P., Brox, T.: U-Net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. In: Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2015. pp. 234–241. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer International Publishing (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24574-4_28

Three LNCS chapters, produced by running splncs04.bst over a .bib file built from the Crossref record for each DOI. Editors and volume numbers are not in those records, so they are absent here; add them to your own entries when you have them. Titles, authors, volumes and pages were checked against Crossref on 2026-10-01.

LaTeX template

Springer's conference proceedings guidelines link the Proceedings LaTeX2e package and the Word templates. The same class is on CTAN as llncs and on Overleaf. We do not have an LNCS template page yet.

Common mistakes

• Using an older Springer .bst left over from a previous project. The current package ships splncs04.bst.
• Expecting citation-order numbering. splncs04 sorts the list alphabetically, so numbers in the text will not run 1, 2, 3 in order of first mention.
• Unprotected capitals. splncs04 lowercases titles, so “Microsoft COCO” and “U-Net” above only survive because they are in braces in the .bib entry.
• Leaving out DOIs. Springer encourages them, and references that do not meet Crossref's requirements are reformatted in production.

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.