JMLR W&CP Proceedings Specification

Version 1.0 – May 22nd, 2013

To publish a proceedings with JMLR W&CP, the organisers will need to provide the JMLR W&CP Production Editor (Mark Reid) with:

1. A BibTeX file (described below) with the details of each paper in the proceedings.
2. A collection of PDF files (and, optionally, supplementary files).

The following specification is for simple conference proceedings that consist of one or more papers that are to be displayed in page order with links to associated PDF and supplementary files. If you need any clarifications, or need to publish proceedings with special sections, awards, multiple cycles, or other features, please email .

The BibTeX file

Note: The contents of each field must be valid BibTeX (i.e., make sure special characters are escaped correctly).

All of the conference and paper details are contained in a single BibTeX file. You can name it whatever you like but we suggest you use some association with the conference name (e.g., icml13.bib)

There are two types of entry that must appear in the BibTeX file:

• There must be a single @Proceedings entry with the conference details. It must include the following fields:
  • booktitle: the long name of the conference
  • shortname the abbreviation for the conference (without the year, e.g., ICML)
  • year : the year of the conference (e.g., 2013)
  • editor: the editors’ names (in “Lastname, Firstnames” format, separated by “and”)
  • volume: the JMLR W&CP number assigned to your conference
  • Other fields may be present in the @Proceedings entry but these will be ignored at present.
• There must be at one @InProceedings entry for each paper. Each entry must have the following fields:
  • title: The title of the paper
  • author: The paper’s authors in “Lastname, Firstnames” format, separated by “and”
  • pages: The page numbers in “startpage–endpage” format
  • abstract: The paper’s abstract in valid LaTeX
  • Other fields may also appear in the @InProceedings entries but these will be ignored at present.

The identifiers should be of the form lastnameYY where lastname is the lowercase last name of the first author and YY is the last two digits of the year of the conference. If two papers share the same identifier under this scheme, they must be disambiguated by appending one of a, b, c, etc. to the conflicting identifiers (e.g., reid12a and reid12b)

The Papers and Supplementary Material

The paper PDFs must have a filename corresponding to the identifier of its BibTeX entry. For example, the PDF for the reid12a entry must have filename reid12a.pdf. These should all appear in the same directory as the BibTeX file describing all the entries.

Make sure all supplementary filenames for a paper with ID lastnameYY begin with the same ID but end with the suffix -supp (e.g., The PDF supplementary should be named lastnameYY-supp.pdf). These should appear in the same directory as the BibTeX file you provide us. Use whichever file extension is most appropriate (e.g., .pdf for PDF files, .zip for zipped files, .mov for movies, etc.)

For example, suppose the paper with identifier reid12b had a supplementary PDF file with proofs. You should give us a file named reid12b-supp.pdf. The generated site for the reid12b entry will contain a link titled supplementary to the files reid12b-supp.pdf.

Sample BibTeX file and papers

Below is a sample of a BibTeX file for the 2nd International Conference on Examples (ICE’13) in 2013. It has been given volume number 57 and is edited by Jane Smith and Joe Bloggs. It contains three papers. It was provided as part of a gzipped tarball¹ ice13.tar.gz along with the PDF and supplementary files. The contents of the tarball is:

• ice13.bib (The BibTeX file below)
• jones13a.pdf
• jones13a-supp.pdf (Supplementary proofs for jones13a)
• jones13b.pdf
• smythe13.pdf
• smythe13-supp.zip (Supplementary code and data for smythe13)

The contents of the BibTeX file ice13.bib is:

@Proceedings{ICE-2013,
    booktitle = {Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Examples},
    editor = {Jane Smith and Joe Bloggs},
    volume = {57},
    year = {2013},
    shortname = {ICE}
}

@InProceedings{jones13a,
    title = {A Meta-Heuristic for Example Invention},
    author = {Jones, Raphael and Howard, Peter},
    pages = {1-9},
    abstract = {This paper considers the problem of inventing examples to convey features of an abstract specification. We provide a straightforward meta-technique to develop examples by writing any old rubbish that fills up space but still reads like English. Experiments show that this approach fares better than ``lorum ipsum'' text in a variety of cases. Running time (including LaTeX mathematics) is $O(1)$.}
}

@InProceedings{jones13b,
    title = {Example Generalization via Skim Reading},
    author = {Jones, Raphael and Frankel, David and Deutsch, Mark},
    pages = {10-18},
    abstract = {We show how skim reading a small number of examples can give a good sense of a more abstract specification. This is a complementary paper to (Jones et al. 2013) which shares the same first author as this paper and so must be properly disambiguated.}
}

@InProceedings{smythe13,
    title = {Are Three Examples Sufficient?},
    author = {Smythe, Byron and Gordon, Trent},
    pages = {19-26},
    abstract = {We empirically verify that, for the purposes of conveying the details of an abstract BibTeX specification, three example suffice. The related problem of whether three examples are necessary is left as future work.}
}