Citation Style Guide

IEEE Referencing — Complete Guide

The numbered citation system of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — standard in electrical engineering, computer science, telecommunications, and related STEM disciplines.

In this guide
IEEE overview In-text citations Reference list rules Journal article Conference paper Book Website / online source Technical standard Thesis / dissertation Common mistakes

IEEE referencing — overview

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) style is the standard referencing format in electrical engineering, computer science, telecommunications, information technology, and related technical disciplines. It is used in IEEE journal publications, conference proceedings, and is required by many engineering departments worldwide.

Like Vancouver, IEEE uses a numbered system: sources are assigned numbers in brackets [1] in the order they first appear in the text. The reference list is numbered sequentially — not alphabetical.

IEEE vs Vancouver — key differences

In-text citations

Place the number in square brackets immediately where the citation is needed — before the full stop at end of sentence, or mid-sentence. The bracket is part of the sentence but typically not superscripted (unlike Vancouver).

Standard in-text examples
Deep learning has demonstrated remarkable performance in image classification tasks [1].
Several architectures have been proposed [2], [3], with convolutional neural networks [4] proving especially effective for visual recognition [5]–[8].
Use [n]–[m] for consecutive references. Use [n], [m] for non-consecutive.

Citing the same source again

Reuse the same bracket number — the reference appears only once in the reference list under its assigned number.

Referencing an author by name

Narrative-style citation
LeCun et al. [3] demonstrated that convolutional architectures significantly outperform fully connected networks on image benchmarks.

Reference list rules

Journal article

Format
[n] A. A. Author and B. B. Author, "Title of article," Abbreviated Journal Name, vol. X, no. X, pp. xx–xx, Mon. Year, doi: xxxxx.
[1] Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, "Deep learning," Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436–444, May 2015, doi: 10.1038/nature14539.

Conference paper

Conference papers are among the most important source types in engineering and computer science — many landmark results appear in proceedings before or instead of journal publication.

Format
[n] A. A. Author, "Title of paper," in Proc. Name of Conference (Abbreviated), City, Country, Year, pp. xx–xx.
[2] A. Vaswani et al., "Attention is all you need," in Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. (NeurIPS), Long Beach, CA, USA, 2017, pp. 5998–6008.

Book

Format
[n] A. A. Author, Title of Book, Xth ed. City, Country: Publisher, Year.
[3] I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville, Deep Learning. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2016.

Website / online source

Format
[n] A. Author or Organisation, "Title of page," Website Name. Accessed: Mon. Day, Year. [Online]. Available: URL
[4] IEEE, "IEEE author center: journals," IEEE. Accessed: Jan. 15, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org

Technical standard

Format
[n] Title of Standard, Standard Number, Organisation, Year.
[5] IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, IEEE Std 754-2019, IEEE, 2019.

Thesis / dissertation

Format
[n] A. Author, "Title of thesis," Ph.D. dissertation / M.S. thesis, Dept., University, City, Country, Year.
[6] J. K. Nguyen, "Efficient deep neural network compression for edge deployment," Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Comput. Sci., MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2022.

Common IEEE mistakes

Related Citation Guides
Style
Vancouver
Style
APA 7th Edition
How To
Cite a Journal Article
How To
Cite a Website

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