HOW TO FORMAT REFERENCES PROPERLY Unfortunately, it's easy to be sloppy about the reference section of a paper. It's convenient to paste BibTeX from a digital library into your BibTeX file and leave it as-is. But if you do that, your reference section will look really bad. This gives reviewers and readers a bad impression, which is not what you want as an academic! Fortunately, with only a little work, you can make your reference section look great; and if you keep your own BibTeX file that you reuse from one paper to another, you can amortize this work. The references in your paper should be correct, complete, and consistent. Correct means that none of the information is wrong. I won't say much about this, because it's easy to get it right as long as you are careful in writing your BibTeX or get it from the digital library of the paper. But read the information yourself at least once; if you suspect anything is incorrect, double check and fix it! Complete means that you have the minimum necessary information for each thing you are citing. What is required depends on the kind of reference: * For conferences, include author(s), title, conference, and year. * For journals, include author(s), title, journal, volume, number, pages, and year. * For books, include author(s), title, publisher, and year. Consistent is probably the thing that people get wrong the most often. It means that every reference of the same type has the same information in the same form. For example: * Include or exclude DOIs consistently. If the references don't count in the page limit, it's nice to include them; these days they're one of the most useful parts of a citation to readers. * Include or exclude month of publication consistently. * Include or exclude the location consistently. * Include or exclude the publisher consistently (though it must always be included for books). * Include or exclude conference paper page numbers consistently (though they are always required for journal articles). * Make sure you give the canonical citation. A lot of papers at OOPSLA, POPL, etc. used to appear in SIGPLAN Notices, but they should be cited as OOPSLA or POPL papers. Generally, prefer citing the journal version of something over the conference version unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. * Include or exclude the conference acronym (e.g. PLDI) consistently. Note: the acronym *never* replaces the name of the conference. * Abbreviate conference/journal names consistently. It's OK to abbreviate "Transactions on" as "Trans." unless the style guide (or reviewers) for your venue tell you you can't. But don't abbreviate for one reference and not for another. * Use appropriate capitalization. Capitalize the start of the title, proper nouns (including interior letters in words like JavaScript), but nothing else. Learn the BibTeX conventions that automate this. Capitalization of conference/journal names should be consistent. * In general, if one reference looks different from others that are like it, or contains additional information, make them look the same. Because it's often a pain to look up things, I usually default to excluding information except the minimum. This has the nice consequence that the reference list ends up looking clean and you can see the things that are really important.