How to Cite a Conference Paper or Proceedings

In computer science and engineering, conference papers are the main form of publication, and the top venues are as selective as leading journals. In other fields a conference talk is often an early version of work that appears later as an article. How you cite conference work depends on which form you have: a published paper, or a presentation that left no formal publication behind.

This guide starts with IEEE, the style most conference papers are written in.

What to Collect

• All authors, in order
• Paper title
• Full name of the conference and the title of the proceedings
• Year, and the conference dates and location
• Page range or paper number
• Publisher of the proceedings, and volume if it is a series
• DOI or URL

Two real papers serve as worked examples. The first is He, Zhang, Ren and Sun, "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition", from the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 770 to 778. The second is Vaswani and seven co-authors, "Attention Is All You Need", in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 30 (2017). The official NeurIPS proceedings record for this paper gives no page range, so none is shown in the examples.

Quick Reference by Major Style

IEEE

In-text: [1], [2]

The conference location is optional in IEEE's format. The second paper has eight authors, so the IEEE Reference Guide's rule applies: list up to six, and for more than six use the first author and "et al." The guide also notes that all published conference papers have page numbers, so look for them on the publisher's record. Give the pages that record shows, and do not copy a page range from a third-party database without checking it.

Presented but not published:

APA (7th Edition)

APA has no separate "proceedings" template. Proceedings published as a book are cited as a chapter in an edited book. Proceedings published as a regular numbered series are cited like a journal.

In-text: (He et al., 2016) and (Vaswani et al., 2017)

Presentation without a published paper:

Use the description that matches the programme. APA's examples are [Conference session], [Paper presentation], [Poster session] and [Keynote address]. The date is the full span of the conference, even though your talk took place on one day.

MLA (9th Edition)

In-text: (He et al. 772)

The MLA Style Center's own example shows a proceedings title that already contains the meeting dates: Hualde, José Ignacio. "Patterns of Correspondence in the Adaptation of Spanish Borrowings in Basque." Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12-15, 1999: General Session and Parasession on Loan Word Phenomena, edited by Steven S. Chang et al., Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2000, pp. 348-58. For a talk you attended, MLA lists the speaker, the title in quotation marks, the conference, the date and the venue.

Chicago (18th Edition)

Published in proceedings, cited like a chapter:

Bibliography:

Unpublished presentation (template):

The 18th edition no longer encloses the presentation details in parentheses in a note. The 17th edition form was: "Title of Paper" (paper presented at Name of Conference, City, Month Day, Year). The 18th edition also shortens the note to the first author and "et al." for three or more authors.

Harvard (Cite Them Right)

In-text: (He et al., 2016)

Which Version to Cite

A single piece of research can exist as an arXiv preprint, a conference paper and later an extended journal article. Cite the version you read, and prefer the most formal version that contains what you need.

1. Journal version, if it exists and covers your point. It is usually the fullest and most carefully reviewed.
2. Proceedings version. It is peer reviewed and is the version of record for the conference.
3. Preprint, only when nothing else exists, or for material that appears only there. See how to cite preprints.

Google Scholar often merges these versions into one record, and exported citations can mix the title of one with the venue of another. Check each reference against the publisher's page, such as IEEE Xplore, the ACM Digital Library or the proceedings website.

Proceedings Series

Some proceedings appear inside a book series or a journal-like series, and the series information belongs in the reference.

• Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer). Cite as a chapter in an edited book, and include the series and volume: In E. Editor (Ed.), Title of proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 12345, pp. 1–15). Springer.
• Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR). This is a numbered series; cite it like a journal, with the volume and pages.
• ACM proceedings. Give the full proceedings title and the DOI. ACM assigns article numbers to some papers; use the article number where the pages would go.

Posters, Abstracts and Slides

Poster. APA: [Poster session]. If the poster file is in a repository such as Figshare or OSF, add the URL.

Published abstract only. If only an abstract appeared in the proceedings or in a journal supplement, cite that publication and add [Abstract] or [Conference abstract] after the title in APA.

Slides or a recording of the talk. Cite the presentation and give the URL of the slides or video. For slides from a course and not a conference, see how to cite a PowerPoint.

A talk you attended, with no materials available. Cite it as an unpublished presentation with the date and place. If the claim is important, ask the presenter whether a paper or preprint exists.

Common Mistakes

• Citing the whole proceedings volume instead of the paper
• Citing the arXiv preprint when a peer-reviewed version has been published
• Copying a reference from Google Scholar that blends two versions
• Leaving out page numbers or the DOI for a published paper
• Writing the conference name in full in IEEE, or abbreviating it in APA
• Using the year of the conference when the proceedings were published the following year. Use the publication year for published papers.
• Treating a talk abstract in a programme booklet as a full paper

Sources for These Formats

• IEEE Reference Guide, version 3.28.2025, section C, "Conferences and Conference Proceedings"; section M, "Periodicals", whose note on early access says to cite the publisher's version rather than the arXiv one; and section S, "Unpublished", which holds the arXiv preprint format
• APA Style, "Conference Presentation References" and "Conference Proceeding References" (apastyle.apa.org)
• MLA Handbook, 9th ed., and the MLA Style Center, "How do I cite conference proceedings?" (style.mla.org/citing-conference-proceedings)
• The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed., on papers presented at meetings, and "What's New in the 18th Edition" (chicagomanualofstyle.org)
• Pears and Shields, Cite Them Right; University College Dublin Library, Harvard style guide, "Conferences"

Full style rules: IEEE, APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard.