Citations & Bibliography

How to Cite a Preprint vs the Published Version in LaTeX

In fast-moving fields like ML and physics, you often find papers on arXiv before they're published. Here's how to cite both correctly and when to prefer one over the other.

Citing an arXiv Preprint

When a paper is only available as a preprint, cite the arXiv version:

@article{vaswani2017attention,
  title = {Attention Is All You Need},
  author = {Vaswani, Ashish and others},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762},
  year = {2017}
}

% Or more formally with BibLaTeX:
@unpublished{vaswani2017attention,
  title = {Attention Is All You Need},
  author = {Vaswani, Ashish and others},
  note = {arXiv:1706.03762},
  year = {2017}
}

Citing the Published Version (Preferred)

Once a paper is published, update your citation to the journal/conference version:

@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
  title = {Attention Is All You Need},
  author = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki
            and others},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume = {30},
  year = {2017}
}

When to Cite Which

General rules for choosing between preprint and published versions:

% CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION when:
% - The paper has been peer-reviewed and published
% - A journal/conference version exists
% - Your field expects formal citations (most do)

% CITE THE PREPRINT when:
% - No published version exists yet
% - The preprint has significant content not in the published version
% - You're citing a very recent work (< 6 months old)

% TIP: Google Scholar shows both versions.
% Click "All X versions" to find the published one.

💡 Tips

•Always prefer the published version if one exists — it carries more weight with reviewers
•Keep your .bib file updated: replace preprint entries when papers get published
•Some conferences (NeurIPS, ICML) require citing their proceedings, not arXiv
•Use Semantic Scholar or Google Scholar's 'All versions' to find the published version

Try This in Bibby AI

Write LaTeX faster with AI auto-complete and instant compilation.

Start Writing Free