IEEE citation and formatting guide

Citing in the text

Numbering goes by the order in which a source is first cited in your text. Don’t think about alphabetical order at all in IEEE. Whatever number a source gets the first time, that same number is used each time you cite it again.

• In text, the citation is just a number in square brackets on the same line, and it comes inside the punctuation. So you type “…as reported in earlier studies [3].” with the bracket before the full stop. IEEE has no superscript citations.
• A citation can work like a footnote marker (“as shown in [4]”). It can also be used as a noun in the sentence (“see [4] for the derivation”). If you want to name the authors and there are three or more, write the first author and “et al.”, as in “Wood et al. [7] found…”.
• For a group of sources, each number gets its own bracket, like “[2], [5], [9]”. The 2025 Reference Guide has stopped the en dash range, so “[1]–[4]” has to be written as “[1], [2], [3], [4]”. But older guides and many conference templates still show ranges, so go with the journal you are targeting.
• Sometimes you want to point at just one part of a source. Then write that part inside the bracket itself, as [3, p. 15], [1, Fig. 2], [1, eq. (8)], [2, Sec. IV] or [5, Ch. 3]. This is the form the Editorial Style Manual wants, and not wording like “in Fig. 2 of reference [1]”.
• There is no “ibid.” or “op. cit.” in IEEE. Simply repeat the same number.

Reference list rules

Give the list the title References and keep it in number order. Each number is in square brackets, flush left, in its own column. The text of the entry hangs next to the number.

• Author names: we write initials and then surname in IEEE, like “J. K. Author”, and the “Author, J. K.” form of other styles is wrong here. If there are six authors or less, all of them go in the list. With more than six, give the first author’s name and then “et al.”
• Article, chapter and paper titles are put in double quotation marks. Only the first word and proper nouns take a capital letter. And the comma after the title comes before the closing quotation mark.
• Journal, book and conference proceedings titles are in italics. Journal names and conference names are abbreviated too (more on that below).
• Months are shortened, like Jan., Feb., Aug., Oct. If one issue is for two months, put a slash between them (Jul./Aug.).
• Every reference ends with a full stop, even if a DOI is the last thing in it. The one exception is a reference finishing with a URL, there you don’t put any full stop.
• One source per number. Each paper needs its own number, you cannot club two of them together.

Reference examples by source type

For each source type we show the pattern first. After that comes an example taken from the IEEE Reference Guide. Italics are shown the same way they should come in your own list.

Journal article

J. K. Author, “Name of paper,” Abbrev. Title of Periodical, vol. x, no. x, pp. xxx–xxx, Abbrev. Month, year, doi: xxx.

[1] M. M. Chiampi and L. L. Zilberti, “Induction of electric field in human bodies moving near MRI,” IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 58, no. 10, pp. 2787–2793, Oct. 2011, doi: 10.1109/TBME.2011.2158315.

Some journals give article numbers and no pages. For those, write “Art. no. xxx” in the place of the page range.

Conference paper in published proceedings

J. K. Author, “Title of paper,” in Abbreviated Name of Conf., (location optional), year, pp. xxx–xxx, doi: xxx.

[2] G. Veruggio, “The EURON roboethics roadmap,” in Proc. Humanoids ’06: 6th IEEE-RAS Int. Conf. Humanoid Robots, 2006, pp. 612–617, doi: 10.1109/ICHR.2006.321337.

Suppose the paper was presented at the conference but never published in the proceedings. Then write “presented at the” instead of “in”, followed by the conference name, city, country and the dates.

Book

[3] B. Klaus and P. Horn, Robot Vision. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1986.

See that the italic title is followed by a full stop and not a comma. The US state comes only because the publisher is in the US. For a book from New Delhi you write “New Delhi, India: Publisher, year.” When the book is not a first edition, put the edition (“2nd ed.”) after the title.

Chapter in an edited book

J. K. Author, “Title of chapter in the book,” in Title of Published Book, X. Editor, Ed., City of Publisher, State (only U.S.), Country: Abbrev. of Publisher, year, pp. xxx–xxx.

Standard

[4] IEEE Criteria for Class IE Electric Systems, IEEE Standard 308, 1969.

The order for a standard is title of standard, standard number, corporate author, location and date. Indian standards also use this same order, only with the BIS number put in.

Patent

[5] J. P. Wilkinson, “Nonlinear resonant circuit devices,” U.S. Patent 3 624 125, Jul. 16, 1990.

For a patent from another country, say India, you write that country’s name and its patent number where the example has “U.S. Patent”. Keep the day of the month as it is.

Website

First Name Initial(s) Last Name. “Page Title.” Website Title. Accessed: Abbrev. Month Day, Year. [Online]. Available: URL

Always give the date on which you opened the page. Web pages keep changing, and only the accessed date shows the reader which version you had seen.

Thesis or dissertation

[6] J. O. Williams, “Narrow-band analyzer,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Eng., Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA, USA, 1993.

An Indian thesis follows this pattern only, with the Indian place names, as “Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Eng., Name of Univ., City, India, year.” In case you read it on Shodhganga, add “[Online]. Available:” and then the Shodhganga handle.

Dataset

[7] S. Ansolabehere, M. Palmer, and A. Lee, January 20, 2014, “Precinct-Level Election Data. V1,” distributed by Harvard Election Data Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/21919

Put the version number when the dataset has one. If there is a DOI for the dataset, give the DOI to reader instead of a web address.

Software and code

J. K. Author. Title of Software. (Date). Repository or Archive. (version or year). Publisher Name. Accessed: Date. [Type of Medium]. Global Persistent Identifier. Available: site/path/file

Mention the exact version you worked with. If your GitHub repository has a Zenodo DOI, use the DOI as the persistent identifier. Plain repository links many times get changed or deleted.

Abbreviating journal and conference titles

In IEEE references the titles of journals and conferences are written in short form. IEEE’s own journals have an official abbreviation, and you should use that one. It is given in the IEEE journal and magazine abbreviations list, and the Author Center links to it. For example IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering becomes IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. For conference names, the standard words get shortened and most small words like “of” and “the” are dropped. So “Proceedings of the 1996 Robotics and Automation Conference” is written as “Proc. 1996 Robotics and Automation Conf.”

A journal outside IEEE mostly has its own abbreviation. Mostly you can see it on the journal home page, or in the reference style that journal is using. The ISO 4 abbreviation is also fine to use. Whichever one you take, stay with it and never show one journal in two short forms in the same list.

Equations

The IEEE Editorial Style Manual gives these rules for equations.

• Number the equations in one single run, from the beginning of the article till the end. The number is in parentheses and flush right on the same line as the equation. No number is repeated and none is skipped.
• In the running text you just write the number, like “substituting into (3)”, and the word “Equation” comes only at the start of a sentence (“Equation (3) shows…”).
• If a sentence ends with an equation, that equation gets a full stop. The line that leads into an equation takes punctuation only when that line is a complete sentence by itself.
• Variables are set in italic. Function names like sin, log and exp are in roman, and so are units and abbreviations of words.

Theses many times number equations chapter-wise, like (3.1), (3.2). The IEEE manual does allow section-wise numbering in some publications. Check what your university wants and use it all the way through.

Figures and tables

IEEE has one set of rules for figures and a different set for tables. Lot of authors mix the two up.

• Figures: put the caption below the figure. Start it with “Fig.”, then the Arabic number and a full stop, for example “Fig. 3. Measured return loss of the proposed antenna.” If the figure has parts, label them (a), (b) in the caption.
• In text, it is always the short “Fig.”, even at the start of a sentence like “Fig. 3 shows…”.
• Tables: here the caption comes above the table. Use the label TABLE with a Roman numeral (TABLE I, TABLE II). The descriptive title is centred under that label and does not end in a full stop.
• Fig. 1 should be first cited before Fig. 2, and same way for tables. Every figure and every table has to be cited in the text.
• When the figure comes from some other publication, the caption should carry its citation, and for a copyrighted figure you need permission also from the copyright holder. Usually that is the publisher and not the author.

Many Indian universities change the table numbering for theses and want Arabic numbers chapter-wise, like Table 4.2. In that case go with the university for numbering, and IEEE for the rest.

Common mistakes in IEEE reference lists

• List in alphabetical order. An IEEE list goes by citation order. Even if you move only one chapter near the end, you have to renumber the references again. A reference manager will redo the numbers for you. A list typed by hand will not.
• Surname first (“Kumar, A.”). IEEE wants the initials before the surname.
• Full journal names mixed with abbreviations in the same list. Choose one way and use it throughout.
• “et al.” after three authors, a habit brought in from other styles. The IEEE reference list shows up to six authors.
• Superscript citation numbers, or citations placed after the full stop.
• Missing volume, issue or page numbers. As per the guide, you have to search out the missing details and fill them in. Leaving them out is not the answer.
• Theses citing web pages with no accessed date.
• Reference manager output not proofread. Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote each have an IEEE style, and these differ slightly. Also the imported data many times has full journal names, or article titles in title case.

IEEE gives a free tool also, the IEEE Reference Preparation Assistant, which checks and formats one reference at a time only. It is good for spot checks, but you still have to read the whole list yourself.

Does your department follow author–date referencing? Then go to our APA 7 guide. If you want the full thesis or manuscript checked for consistency, look at thesis editing and proofreading or journal manuscript preparation.