IEEE Citation Style Guide

A reference guide for engineering, technology, and computer science papers.

Overview In-Text Citations Reference List Books Journal Articles Conference Papers Online Sources

Overview

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) uses a numbered citation system. References are numbered in the order they appear in the text, and those same numbers are used throughout the paper whenever the source is cited again. This differs from author–date systems like APA.

  • Used in: Engineering, computer science, electronics, telecommunications, and related STEM fields.
  • Citation format: A numeral in square brackets [1] placed in the running text.
  • Reference list: Numbered list, in the order citations first appear in text (not alphabetical).
  • Author names: Use initials and surname. No full first names.

In-Text Citations

Single source: As shown in [1], the results indicate…
Multiple sources: Several studies have confirmed this [2], [4], [7].
Range of sources: This has been widely demonstrated [1]–[5].
Author as subject: Smith et al. [3] proposed a framework for…
Same source cited again: Use the same number throughout: [1].

Reference List Rules

  • Titled References (centred, no bold unless the journal style requires it).
  • Numbered in square brackets [1], [2], [3] … in order of appearance in text.
  • Author names: initials before surname. Multiple authors separated by commas; last two joined by "and".
  • Titles of articles are in quotation marks; titles of books and periodicals in italics.
  • Abbreviate journal names per IEEE practice (e.g., IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. Learn. Syst.).
  • Include vol., no., pp., and year for journal articles.
  • Month and year for conference papers; city and country of the conference.

Books

Single or multiple authors

[#] A. A. Author and B. B. Author, Title of Book, Xth ed. City, Country: Publisher, Year.

[1] J. D. Irwin and R. M. Nelms, Basic Engineering Circuit Analysis, 10th ed. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley, 2011.

Chapter in edited book

[#] A. A. Author, "Title of chapter," in Title of Book, A. Editor, Ed. City, Country: Publisher, Year, pp. xx–xx.

Journal Articles

Standard journal article

[#] A. A. Author, B. B. Author, and C. C. Author, "Title of article," Abbreviated Journal Name, vol. X, no. X, pp. xxx–xxx, Month Year.

[2] J. Smith, A. Brown, and L. Chen, "Deep learning for medical image analysis," IEEE Trans. Med. Imag., vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 892–905, Mar. 2021.

Article with DOI

[#] A. A. Author, "Title," Journal, vol. X, no. X, pp. xx–xx, Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxxx.

Early access / online first

[#] A. A. Author, "Title of article," Journal Name, early access, Month Day, Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxxx.

Conference Papers

Published conference proceedings

[#] A. A. Author, "Title of paper," in Proc. Conf. Name (ABBR), City, Country, Year, pp. xx–xx.

[3] T. Liu and M. Wang, "Attention mechanisms in NLP," in Proc. Int. Conf. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. (NeurIPS), Vancouver, Canada, 2022, pp. 3450–3461.

Online Sources

Web page

[#] A. A. Author. (Year, Month Day). Title of Page. [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Month Day, Year].

Standard / Technical report

[#] A. A. Author, "Title of report," Organisation, City, Country, Rep. no. XXX, Month Year.

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