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It is not uncommon for conferences in say theoretical computer science to have a strict page limit for the camera ready version (like 12 pages). In addition, the original submitted papers might often contain perhaps even a long appendix.

The submitted paper might postpone proofs to the appendix, or say something like "due to lack of space, you can find this and that in the appendix". However, for the proceedings, it is my understanding that the appendix is completely omitted. I think I have often seen proceedings papers which make "forward references" to the appendix, but strictly speaking this makes little sense because there is no appendix.

So should one remove all references to the appendix in the camera ready version? Or do people typically not care, because it is understood that there is an arXiv version, or because a full version will appear later, or something else?

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  • Welcome to Academia SE. Your question sounds like something that you better ask the publisher/conference. You can still ask here for what is better in case there is no clear guideline though.
    – Wrzlprmft
    Apr 5, 2018 at 8:11

1 Answer 1

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As a general rule, papers should be self-contained. A reference to an appendix would violate this rule if the paper is distributed without the appendix.

Instead, a best practice is to have a reference to an extended version of the paper that includes the appendix:

The proof of this result is provided in [1].

  1. A. Nonymous: How to write a paper (extended version). 2018. Available online at http://arxiv.org/some/url

The extended version would then have the same sentence, but with a reference to the appendix:

The proof of this result is provided in the appendix.

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    Using LaTeX, you can write: "The proof of this result is provided in \ifcameraready\cite{ExtendedVersion}\else the appendix\fi." (You'll obviously need to define \ifcameraready.) You can also wrap the whole thing into a macro \referenceappendix, which replaces the aforemention if-else-block. (The macro definition contains the if-else-block.)
    – user2768
    Apr 5, 2018 at 10:17
  • Rather than the appendix perhaps use Appendix X, where X is the appendix number. (You can also write, [Appendix X, 1], which is \cite[Appendix X]{citationOne} in LaTeX, but I don't know how to replace X with \ref{refAppendixX}, since the appendix doesn't actually appear, so this is perhaps a little too much work.)
    – user2768
    Apr 5, 2018 at 10:21

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