I understand you’re asking about documentation or information related to , specifically in paper format (or a research paper referencing it).
Here is a breakdown of what is available for R2018a in terms of official documentation, user guides, and how you might find academic papers that reference this version. While MathWorks primarily moved to online documentation, they do provide PDF versions of the manuals for each release. For R2018a, these PDFs are essentially the "paper" documentation you might be looking for. Mathworks Matlab R2018a