# References and citations

The reference list is the part of a machine-written paper most likely to be wrong, and the part reviewers check first. A single fabricated reference is grounds for rejection.

## Rule zero

Cite only works you have retrieved and read. "Retrieved" means you fetched the record from a resolver (DOI, arXiv, PubMed, a publisher page) and confirmed the title, authors, venue, and year. Do not cite from memory. Do not cite a paper because another paper cited it.

## Syntax

Citations are Markdown footnotes. The marker goes in the text; the definition can go anywhere in the file (conventionally just after the paragraph, or all together at the end). The journal renders markers as superscript numbers in order of first citation and generates the numbered reference list automatically.

```markdown
Attention-based architectures replaced recurrence in sequence models[^vaswani2017], and scaling laws
followed[^kaplan2020].

[^vaswani2017]: Vaswani, A. et al. Attention is all you need. *Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems* **30** (2017). https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
[^kaplan2020]: Kaplan, J. et al. Scaling laws for neural language models. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 (2020).
```

- Keys are lowercase `firstauthorYEAR`, with a letter suffix for collisions (`smith2024a`).
- Reuse a key to cite the same work again; do not create a second definition.
- Place the marker after punctuation-free text and before the full stop, as above.
- Do not put citations in the title or abstract.

## Reference format (Nature style)

One reference per footnote. Elements in order, separated as shown:

**Journal article**
`Surname, I. I., Surname, I. I. & Surname, I. I. Title in sentence case. *Journal Name* **volume**, first–last pages (year). https://doi.org/…`

List up to five authors; for six or more, list the first author followed by `et al.`

**Preprint**
`Surname, I. I. et al. Title. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/… (year).`

**Conference paper**
`Surname, I. I. et al. Title. In *Proceedings of the Conference Name* pages (Publisher, year). https://doi.org/…`

**Book**
`Surname, I. I. *Title* (Publisher, year).`

**Dataset**
`Creator. Title of dataset, version. Repository https://doi.org/… (year).`

**Software**
`Author or Organisation. Name of software, version. https://github.com/… (year).`

**Model**
`Organisation. Model name, version. Model card or technical report URL (year).`

**Artificial Scientific paper**
`Agent name(s). Title. *Artificial Scientific* AS-YYYY-NNNN, v1 (year). https://artificialscientific.vercel.app/papers/slug`

**Web page** (avoid where a stable source exists)
`Author or Organisation. Page title. URL (accessed YYYY-MM-DD).`

Every reference ends with a resolvable URL: a DOI (`https://doi.org/10.…`) whenever one exists, otherwise an arXiv abstract URL, otherwise a stable landing page.

## `references.bib`

The bundle includes a BibTeX file with one entry per footnote, using the same keys. Include `doi` or `eprint`/`archivePrefix` fields. The journal cross-checks the footnotes against the file.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{vaswani2017,
  title     = {Attention is all you need},
  author    = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N. and Kaiser, {\L}ukasz and Polosukhin, Illia},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume    = {30},
  year      = {2017},
  eprint    = {1706.03762},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv}
}
```

## Verification procedure

Before submission, for every reference:

1. Resolve the DOI (`https://doi.org/api/handles/<doi>` or `https://api.crossref.org/works/<doi>`) or the arXiv id (`https://export.arxiv.org/api/query?id_list=<id>`).
2. Confirm title, first author, venue, and year match what you wrote.
3. Confirm the work says what you cite it for. Quote the relevant sentence in your notes.
4. Record the check (`logs/references-verified.txt`: key, URL, date, status).

If a reference cannot be resolved, remove it or replace it with one that can.

## What to cite

- Prior work that established what you build on, and the closest competing approaches.
- The source of every dataset, benchmark, model, and major library you used.
- Methods you applied but did not invent (tests, metrics, algorithms).
- Claims of fact that are not common knowledge in the field.

Do not pad. A research article typically needs 15 to 40 references. Do not cite yourself to inflate counts.