IEEE citation and formatting guide

Citing in the text

References are numbered in the order they are first cited in the text, not alphabetically. Once a source has a number, it keeps it: every later citation of that source reuses the same number.

• Citations sit on the line in square brackets, inside the punctuation: “…as reported in earlier studies [3].” Not superscript, and not after the full stop.
• A citation can be treated as a footnote marker (“as shown in [4]”) or used as a noun (“see [4] for the derivation”). When you name authors, use the first author plus “et al.” for three or more: “Wood et al. [7] found…”.
• Several sources are listed separately: “[2], [5], [9]”. The 2025 Reference Guide says ranges are no longer written with an en dash: “[1]–[4]” is now written out as “[1], [2], [3], [4]”. Older guides and many conference templates still show ranges, so follow your target journal.
• To point to a specific part of a source, put it inside the bracket: [3, p. 15], [1, Fig. 2], [1, eq. (8)], [2, Sec. IV], [5, Ch. 3]. The Editorial Style Manual asks for this form rather than phrases like “in Fig. 2 of reference [1]”.
• Do not use “ibid.” or “op. cit.”; repeat the number instead.

Reference list rules

The list is titled References and ordered by number. The numbers sit in square brackets flush left, in a column of their own, with the entry text hanging beside them.

• Author names: initials first, then surname (“J. K. Author”, not “Author, J. K.”). List all authors up to six. If there are more than six, give the first author followed by “et al.”
• Article, chapter and paper titles go in double quotation marks with only the first word and proper nouns capitalised; the comma goes inside the closing quotation mark.
• Journal, book and conference proceedings titles are italic. Journal and conference names are abbreviated (see below).
• Months are abbreviated (Jan., Feb., Aug., Oct.); two months for one issue are joined with a slash (Jul./Aug.).
• Every reference ends with a full stop, including those ending with a DOI. The exception is a reference ending with a URL, which has no full stop.
• One source per number. Do not combine two references under one number.

Reference examples by source type

Each pattern is given first, followed by an example from the IEEE Reference Guide. Italics are shown as they should appear.

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.

For journals that use article numbers rather than pages, replace the page range with “Art. no. xxx”.

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.

A paper presented but not published in proceedings uses “presented at the” in place of “in”, followed by the conference name, city, country and dates.

Book

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

Note the full stop (not a comma) after the italic title, and that the US state appears only for US publishers: a book published in New Delhi is “New Delhi, India: Publisher, year.” Add the edition (“2nd ed.”) after the title when it is not the first.

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 pattern is: title of standard, standard number, corporate author, location, date. Indian standards follow the same pattern with the BIS number.

Patent

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

For other countries, replace “U.S. Patent” with the country and patent number, and keep the day of the month.

Website

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

Include the date you accessed the page. Web content changes, and the accessed date tells the reader which version you saw.

Thesis or dissertation

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

For an Indian thesis, the pattern is the same with Indian place names: “Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Eng., Name of Univ., City, India, year.” Add “[Online]. Available:” and the Shodhganga handle if you read it there.

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

Include the version number when there is one, and a DOI in preference to a web address when the dataset has one.

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

Cite the version you used. For a GitHub repository with a Zenodo DOI, the DOI is the persistent identifier; a bare repository link can change or disappear.

Abbreviating journal and conference titles

IEEE references abbreviate the titles of journals and conferences. For IEEE’s own periodicals, use the official abbreviation from the IEEE journal and magazine abbreviations list linked from the Author Center. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering becomes IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. For conferences, abbreviate the standard words and drop most articles and prepositions: “Proceedings of the 1996 Robotics and Automation Conference” becomes “Proc. 1996 Robotics and Automation Conf.”

For non-IEEE journals, use the abbreviation the journal itself gives (usually on its home page or in its own reference style), or the ISO 4 abbreviation. Whichever source you use, be consistent: the same journal should not appear abbreviated two different ways in one reference list.

Equations

According to the IEEE Editorial Style Manual:

• Equations are numbered consecutively from the start of the article to the end, with the number in parentheses flush right on the line of the equation. No repeats and no gaps.
• In text, refer to an equation by its number alone: “substituting into (3)”. Use the word “Equation” only at the start of a sentence: “Equation (3) shows…”.
• Equations that end a sentence take a full stop. A lead-in to an equation takes punctuation only if the lead-in is a complete sentence.
• Variables are italic; function names (sin, log, exp), units and abbreviations of words are roman.

In a thesis, equations are commonly numbered by chapter, as (3.1), (3.2), which the IEEE manual allows by section in some publications. Check which your university prescribes and apply it throughout.

Figures and tables

Figures and tables follow different conventions in IEEE style, which catches many authors out:

• Figures: the caption goes below the figure, beginning with “Fig.” and an Arabic number and a full stop: “Fig. 3. Measured return loss of the proposed antenna.” Parts are labelled (a), (b) in the caption.
• In text, always use the abbreviation “Fig.”, even at the start of a sentence: “Fig. 3 shows…”.
• Tables: the caption goes above the table, with the label TABLE and a Roman numeral (TABLE I, TABLE II), and the descriptive title centred below the label, with no full stop at the end.
• Figures and tables are first cited in numerical order, and each must be cited in the text.
• A figure reproduced from another publication needs a citation in the caption and, for copyrighted material, permission from the copyright holder — usually the publisher, not the author.

Many Indian universities override the table numbering for theses and require chapter-based Arabic numbering (Table 4.2). If yours does, follow the university and keep the rest of IEEE’s conventions.

Common mistakes in IEEE reference lists

• List in alphabetical order. IEEE lists follow citation order. If you reorder chapters late, renumber the references. Reference managers do this automatically; manual lists do not.
• Surname first (“Kumar, A.”). IEEE puts initials first.
• Full journal names mixed with abbreviations in the same list.
• “et al.” after three authors, carried over from other styles. IEEE lists up to six authors in the reference list.
• Superscript citation numbers or citations placed after the full stop.
• Missing volume, issue or page numbers. The guide asks you to find and include missing information rather than leave it out.
• Theses citing web pages with no accessed date.
• Reference manager output not proofread. IEEE styles in Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote differ slightly; imported metadata often has full journal names or title-case article titles.

IEEE also offers a free tool, the IEEE Reference Preparation Assistant, which checks and formats individual references. It is useful for spot checks but is no substitute for reading the list.

If your department uses author–date referencing instead, see our APA 7 guide. For a full consistency check of a thesis or manuscript, see thesis editing and proofreading or journal manuscript preparation.