As Technical Paper Co-Chair for SOUPS 2026, I have been leading a group of volunteers that are checking references in accepted but not-yet-published papers. I have also been reaching out to authors about the more serious issues we observed and how they have come about. Below I detail recommendations based on our observations. Each recommendation is paired with a “why” where I talk about what we observed.

Reference storage

Store references directly in BibTeX

At minimum store references in a format that can be directly exported to BibTeX without having to go through an intermediary that has to re-interpret the reference content: like an LLM or a less skilled person.

Keep in mind that conversion to a BibTeX file requries some modification of references such as identifying author first and last names seperately, and ensuring that some capitalization, such as DNS, is properly preserved.

Why: Several possible hallucinations at SOUPS this year were caused by an author storing their references in some other format such as Word or Excel and then day of submission trying to move all those references over into BibTeX. Due to time limitations they used approaches like asking an LLM to do it or asking a very junior researcher to do it for them. We observed that such reference copying resulted in fabricated-looking references.

Keep separate BibTeX files based on reference provenence

Know which references have been carefully checked and which have not. One option LaTeX provides is having multiple BibTeX files. Consider using this feature to store the references that have been carefully checked seperate from those where checking has not yet happened. Also consider using it to seperate out references that have been blinded for submission.

Why: It is good practice to record the papers read somewhere, and it can be time consuming to clearly check all aspects of a reference that may never be used in a paper. As a result, people use tools like Zotero and Mendeley which can automatically collect bibliography information and store it quickly.

These tools are amazing, save time, and ensure researchers have a fast-to-create record of papers they have seen. But these tools very often fail when it comes to creating a full and correct reference. They can omit authors, leave out venues, or record the wrong location for a conference. They are also less effective at capturing things like which chapter of a book the researcher is referring to, or the exact page number being referenced.

We observed many of these errors at SOUPS 2026. Some communication with authors suggest that tools like Zotero and Mendeley combined with not double checking their output is to blame. So please use these tools with care, and to save time consider using seperate BibTeX files for auto-collected references and hand-cleaned references.

Refer to the paper PDF on the publisher site

Officially the correct reference is always the information on the paper PDF as downloaded from the publisher’s website. If there is a conflict between the paper PDF and the publisher metadata, the PDF is considered to be the more accurate. When providing a URL to a paper, preferably use the DOI that links to the publisher version, or a link to the publisher’s site. Avoid linking to less-canonical sites like the author’s website, or Research Gate unless there is no other option.

Why: The metadata on places like DBLP, and Google Scholar have a high quality mix. We saw several cases of authors taking their bibliography information from these sites, but that information did not match the actual paper. We also observed cases where the correct DOI was linked to, but author names had been copied from Google Scholar and did not match the PDF the link lead to.

Many publishers offer a BibTeX citation download directly, this is often, but not aways, accurate. It is advisable to always start with the publisher-provided BibTeX and then check that the information is correct and nothing is missing.

ArXiv

Include version numbers when referencing arXiv

arXiv gives several DOI number options for citing a paper including both to the paper in general AND the individual versions. Make sure to use the DOI that includes the version number.

Why: Because an arXiv paper is not peer-reviewed or published it can change quite significantly between versions including swapping out the title entirely or changing the author list. We saw some papers this year flagged by the citation checker because the reference information was from v1 but the link didn’t specify the version so the citation checker checked against the most recent version (v2) and concluded that the reference did not match and might be hallucinated.