NeurIPS submission checklist
15 things to check before you submit to NeurIPS. scime checks all of them on your LaTeX project — page count on the compiled PDF, every reference against arXiv, DBLP, Crossref and OpenAlex — in about a minute.
Key rules at a glance
- Main text, submission
- 9 pages (references and appendix not counted)
- Main text, camera-ready
- 10 pages
- Review
- Double-blind: no author names, self-identifying links or acknowledgments
- NeurIPS Paper Checklist
- Required. Recent NeurIPS calls desk-reject submissions without the paper checklist.
- Official rules
- neurips.cc
Rules change between years. The official call for papers always wins; tell us if something here is out of date (contact@latenticlabs.com).
NeurIPS rules
- Main text fits in 9 pages for review (10 for the camera-ready version)
Measured on the compiled PDF up to the references. Over-length submissions can be desk-rejected.
- The official NeurIPS style file is used, in submission (review) mode
Submission mode keeps the author names hidden; the camera-ready option shows them.
- NeurIPS Paper Checklist is included
Recent NeurIPS calls desk-reject submissions without the paper checklist.
Anonymity (double-blind review)
- No first-person references to your own prior work
Write “Smith et al. (2024) showed…”, not “in our previous work”.
- Code and model links are anonymized
A github.com or huggingface.co link to your account reveals who you are; use an anonymous mirror.
- No acknowledgments or \thanks footnotes
Funding and affiliation notes identify the authors; add them back for the camera-ready version.
- The PDF has no author metadata or email addresses
hyperref’s pdfauthor and stray emails survive in the compiled file.
References
- Every \cite key has a bibliography entry
Missing keys print as [?] in the PDF.
- Each arXiv ID and DOI points to the paper you meant
Copied BibTeX often carries the ID of a different paper.
- Every cited paper exists, with the right title and authors
Each entry is looked up on arXiv, DBLP, Crossref and OpenAlex; AI-suggested references are the usual culprit.
Missing items and LaTeX slips
- Every \ref points to an existing \label
Broken cross-references print as ?? in the PDF.
- No leftover TODO, FIXME or highlighted text
Reviewers notice; so do area chairs.
- Every figure and table has a caption, a label and a mention in the text
Unreferenced floats read as unfinished work.
- No unescaped % after a number
In LaTeX, 41% starts a comment and silently deletes the rest of the line.
- No repeated words, a/an slips or mixed spellings
Cheap to fix, and they shape a reviewer’s first impression.
Run the whole checklist on your paper
Upload your Overleaf ZIP or start from the NeurIPS 2025 template. The free plan shows how many issues each check finds; a Submission pass shows every issue with its line and adds AI proofreading. Not ready to upload? Try it on our example paper, which has deliberate mistakes.