Engineering and computer science IEEE citations are mostly not journal articles. A robotics project cites a conference paper, an ISO standard, a sensor's datasheet and a GitHub repository; a machine learning dissertation cites arXiv preprints, a dataset and a Zenodo software release. This guide, published by EdCitation, sets out how the IEEE Reference Guide, version 3.28.2025, handles each of those sources, how five engineering schools apply it, and what to fix by hand.
The IEEE's rules for journals, in-text numbers and abbreviations are in the IEEE referencing guide, and the page layout in IEEE paper format; neither is repeated here. Every rule below was read on 27 September 2026 at its source. EdCitation's free IEEE citation generator builds entries from a DOI, an ISBN, an arXiv ID or a web address, and we ran it on the sources in this guide: its output is quoted exactly, with what we corrected.
Which sources do engineers and computer scientists cite in IEEE style?
Conference papers, standards, software, datasets, preprints, theses, technical reports, datasheets and patents, each with its own pattern in the IEEE Reference Guide (IEEE, 2025). The examples are real and were checked at their sources.
| Source type | What to include | Example | Rule from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conference paper | Authors, "title," abbreviated proceedings name, month and year, pages, DOI | K. He, G. Gkioxari, P. Dollár, and R. Girshick, “Mask R-CNN,” in 2017 IEEE Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. (ICCV), Oct. 2017, pp. 2980–2988, doi: 10.1109/ICCV.2017.322. | Conference Proceedings With DOI; Cite a source builds it from the DOI |
| IEEE standard | Title, standard number, date | IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, IEEE Standard 754-2019, Jul. 2019, doi: 10.1109/IEEESTD.2019.8766229. | Standards |
| ISO standard | Title, number with year, date | Quality Management Systems – Requirements, ISO 9001:2015, Sep. 2015. | Standards |
| Software release | Author. Title. (Date). Repository. (Version). Identifier | The Matplotlib Development Team. Matplotlib: Visualization with Python. (Jul. 18, 2026). Zenodo. (v3.11.1). doi: 10.5281/zenodo.21422872. | Software |
| Dataset | Author, date, "title," source, DOI | R. A. Fisher, 1936, “Iris,” UCI Machine Learning Repository, doi: 10.24432/C56C76. | Datasets |
| arXiv preprint | Authors, "title," year, arXiv identifier | J. Devlin, M.-W. Chang, K. Lee, and K. Toutanova, “BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding,” 2018, arXiv:1810.04805. | Preprint arXiv |
| Technical report | Authors, "title," institution, report number, date | M. Armbrust et al., “Above the clouds: A Berkeley view of cloud computing,” EECS Dept., Univ. California, Berkeley, Tech. Rep. UCB/EECS-2009-28, Feb. 10, 2009. | Reports |
| Patent | Inventor, "title," country and number, issue date | L. Page, “Method for node ranking in a linked database,” U.S. Patent 6 285 999 B1, Sep. 4, 2001. | Patent |
| Datasheet | Company, place. Title, document number. (Year). Access date. URL | Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX, USA. LM741 Operational Amplifier, SNOSC25D. (2015). Accessed: Sep. 27, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm741.pdf | Manual (Online) |
How do I cite a conference paper in IEEE?
Give the authors, the paper's title in quotation marks, "in" and the proceedings name in italics, shortened with IEEE's word list, then the date, pages and DOI. The IEEE (2025) shortens Proceedings to Proc., International to Int., Symposium to Symp. and Conference to Conf., writes ordinals as numerals (1st, not First), drops most articles and prepositions, and notes that every published proceedings paper has page numbers.
What the record gets wrong
Publishers' records are where most slips come from. EdCitation's Cite a source, given DOI 10.1109/ICCV.2017.322, returned:
K. He, G. Gkioxari, P. Dollar, and R. Girshick, “Mask R-CNN,” in 2017 IEEE Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. (ICCV), Oct. 2017, pp. 2980–2988, doi: 10.1109/ICCV.2017.322.
The abbreviations, date, pages and DOI are right. The name is not: the publisher's record spells Piotr Dollár without the accent, which arXiv's record of the same paper keeps, so we restored it. For DOI 10.1145/2333660.2333752, the tool printed "in Proc. 2012 ACM/IEEE Int. Symp. Low power Electron. Des.", carrying over the lower-case "power" from the record; write "Low Power". The IEEE's own example of that paper prints "Design" in full, although its list shortens Design to Des.
Presented, not published
A talk with no proceedings takes "presented at" with the conference's place and dates, and a paper number if it has one. The IEEE referencing guide shows the form.
How do I cite an IEEE, ISO or BS standard in IEEE style?
Give the standard's title in italics, its number and its date; the IEEE (2025) also allows the corporate author and location between number and date. Cite the edition you actually used, with its year: standards are revised, and the number without the year points at whichever edition is current.
IEEE standards
IEEE's standards carry DOIs, but their records are thin. Cite a source, given 10.1109/IEEESTD.2019.8766229, returned "IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, 2019. doi: 10.1109/IEEESTD.2019.8766229.", taking the year from the DOI because the record carries no date and no standard number. The IEEE Standards Association (2019) page supplies both: IEEE 754-2019, published on 22 July 2019. Add them as in the table.
ISO standards
We found no DOI for ISO 9001, and iso.org refused automated readers. Cite a source answered the ISO 9001 page with "That page could not be read. Some sites block automated readers. If it is a journal article, paste its DOI or its title instead." A title search offered five other works, none of them the standard. Build ISO entries by hand from the standard's page. An archived copy of that page, from 13 September 2026, gives the fifth edition, published in September 2015, one amendment (ISO 9001:2015/Amd 1:2024), and a replacement expected "within the coming months" (International Organization for Standardization, 2015). We could not confirm whether ISO 9001:2026 had appeared by 27 September. If you relied on the amendment, name it too.
British Standards
BSI registers DOIs beginning 10.3403. For 10.3403/30392671, the tool gave the title and DOI but again no number or date; BSI's page names it BS EN 1990:2023, published on 30 August 2023 (British Standards Institution, 2023). The IEEE entry is Eurocode. Basis of Structural and Geotechnical Design, BS EN 1990:2023, Aug. 2023, doi: 10.3403/30392671.
How do I cite software, code or a GitHub repository in IEEE?
Name the author or team, the software's title in italics, the release date, the repository, the version and a persistent identifier. The IEEE (2025) follows the FORCE11 software citation principles, whose sixth asks for the specific version used. Its own software examples give no version, which is a gap to fill, not copy.
Zenodo: cite the version DOI
Zenodo gives each release its own DOI, and a concept DOI that "resolves to the landing page of the latest version" (Zenodo, n.d.). Zenodo advises citing the specific version. Matplotlib's concept DOI, 10.5281/zenodo.592536, resolved on our run to v3.11.2 of 11 September 2026: a paper finished in July would cite software its author never ran. The version DOI for v3.11.1 gave:
The Matplotlib Development Team, Matplotlib: Visualization with Python. (Jul. 18, 2026). Zenodo. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.21422872.
The APA entry from the same run named "Version v3.11.1"; the IEEE entry dropped it, and put a comma after the author where the IEEE's pattern has a full stop. The table shows the corrected entry.
GitHub and the repository's own citation file
A repository with a CITATION.cff file at its root shows "Cite this repository" in its sidebar, in two formats only: "We currently support APA and BibTeX" (GitHub, n.d.). There is no IEEE option, so translate. The file may also name a preferred citation: PyTorch's asks to be cited through a paper at ASPLOS '24, an ACM conference, whose DOI goes straight into Cite a source.
Cite a source read https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch as a web page, with the repository's description as its title and no author, date or version. For a repository, build the entry from the citation file and the release page:
PyTorch Team. PyTorch. (Sep. 2, 2026). GitHub. (v2.14.0). Accessed: Sep. 27, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch
How do I cite a dataset, arXiv preprint, thesis or technical report?
Each has an IEEE pattern, and each has one trap.
Datasets
The IEEE (2025) adopts FORCE11's data citation principles, so a dataset entry names whoever created it, when it was released, its title and version, who distributes it, and its DOI or address. For DOI 10.24432/C56C76 the tool returned R. A. Fisher, “Iris.” UCI Machine Learning Repository, 1936. doi: 10.24432/C56C76., with the year after the source; the IEEE's order puts it after the author, as in the table.
arXiv preprints
Give the year and the identifier exactly as arXiv shows it. Cite a source took the bare identifier 1810.04805, found its DOI and returned "“BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding,” 2018, arXiv. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805." Replace the ending with "arXiv:1810.04805." and set the title in sentence case. If you read the version later published at a conference, cite that instead.
Theses and technical reports
A thesis takes "M.S. thesis" or "Ph.D. dissertation", the department, the university and the place, and the IEEE (2025) keeps whichever word the author's university used. Shannon's 1940 thesis, with the department as MIT's repository names it, becomes:
C. E. Shannon, “A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits,” M.S. thesis, Dept. Elect. Eng. Comput. Sci., Massachusetts Inst. Technol., Cambridge, MA, USA, 1940. [Online]. Available: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11173
More is in how to cite a dissertation or thesis.
A technical report puts the institution and report number after the title. The Berkeley report in the table has eleven authors, so it takes the first and "et al.", the IEEE's rule for more than six.
How do I cite a datasheet, a manual or a patent?
Cite a datasheet as an online manual, with the company as author and the document number doing an edition's work, and a patent by its issue date. The IEEE (2025) gives no datasheet section, but its general rules use one as the example of a missing date: "BAR50 Series Infineon PIN Diode Datasheet. (n.d.)." Adelaide University (2026) repeats that example.
Datasheets and manuals
Take every detail from the datasheet itself, not the distributor's page. TI's LM741 datasheet carries its literature number, SNOSC25D, and "May 1998, revised October 2015" on page one. The letter D is the revision: cite the date of the one you read.
Patents
A patent can carry a priority date, a filing date and an issue date; the IEEE (2025) says to use the issue date and to keep the day of the month. Page's patent in the table was filed on 9 January 1998 and issued on 4 September 2001.
How do engineering schools set IEEE?
By department, and not always the same way. Five library guides, all dated 2026:
- University of Bath (2026), updated 18 August: IEEE is used mainly in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. For software whose creator is also its publisher, begin with the title, and adapt a pattern when the IEEE has none.
- Adelaide University (2026), updated 21 September: typically electrical, electronic and computer systems engineering; check the style with your lecturer.
- Murdoch University (2026), updated 19 August: a dataset example, M. Ambrose, 2018. "Air Infiltration Results for 129 Australian Dwellings," vol. 1, CSIRO, with a full stop after the year where the IEEE puts a comma.
- Texas Tech University (2026), updated 16 April: labels IEEE the style of electrical engineering, and points computer science to ACM, civil engineering to ASCE and mechanical to ASME. It still allows ranges such as [1] - [5], which version 3.28.2025 writes out in full.
- Santa Clara University (2026), updated 24 February: a GitHub pattern separated by commas, "J. Smith, Data Processing Scripts, GitHub, Apr. 2024.", where the IEEE's software pattern uses full stops and a date in round brackets.
Where the handbook and the IEEE differ, the handbook marks your work, so follow it. Where it is silent, follow the IEEE. More on who uses the style is in when to use IEEE style.
What if my computer science course uses ACM format?
Use ACM's own reference format, because EdCitation does not build ACM, and IEEE is not a substitute. As the Association for Computing Machinery (2023) describes it, read in an archived copy, entries give full names rather than initials, then the year, then the title; the text cites by number, [1], but an author named in a sentence takes the year in brackets, "Burando et al. [1999]". ACM asks authors to use their .bib file with its ACM Reference Format BibTeX style. The BibTeX export from Cite a source can be that file: BibTeX for LaTeX and Overleaf shows how, and the history of IEEE references explains why the two styles look alike.
Which EdCitation tools build and check an engineering reference list?
EdCitation is the best tool for an engineering list, since every entry it gives is read from a record and none is composed: the Mask R-CNN entry above came from the publisher's record, and a chatbot asked for it has no record to read. Its limits are the records': standards without numbers, a dropped accent.
- Build each entry in Cite a source, free with no account, from a DOI, an ISBN, an arXiv ID or a web address, in IEEE or any of APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard and Vancouver, with a retraction screen.
- Correct it by this guide: standards' numbers and dates, versions, dataset years, arXiv identifiers.
- Keep and export the list with a free account, as Word, RIS or BibTeX for LaTeX.
- Check the finished list in Verify references, also free.
What Verify references said about a real list
We pasted six IEEE entries: Mask R-CNN, BERT, IEEE 754, Hunter's 2007 Matplotlib paper, the ISLPED paper with its year deliberately changed to 2013, and the Iris dataset. It verified five, and marked one "check this":
- ISLPED: "The work was published in 2012, not 2013; the record has no date in 2013." Our planted error, caught.
BERT, entered by its arXiv identifier, was looked up as the preprint and verified: "The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches." So was the Iris dataset, whose one-word title in quotation marks it read correctly.
A "check this" means look again, and here a look settles it. Upload the whole paper and Verify references also pairs every bracketed number with its entry; Pro's References from a file, $8 a month, does both from the file (see pricing). EdCitation never writes any part of a paper or its code.
Quick questions
How do I cite an ISO standard in IEEE style?
Give the title in italics, the number with its year and the date: Quality Management Systems – Requirements, ISO 9001:2015, Sep. 2015. Take them from ISO's page: we found no DOI for ISO 9001 to build it from.
How do I cite a GitHub repository in IEEE?
Name the team or author, the software's title in italics, the release date, GitHub, the version, an access date and the address. Take them from the repository's CITATION.cff file and release page, which offer APA and BibTeX only.
Should I cite the Zenodo concept DOI or the version DOI?
The version DOI. Zenodo's concept DOI always opens the latest release, which may not be the one you ran.
Can EdCitation make an IEEE reference from an arXiv ID?
Yes. EdCitation's free Cite a source takes a bare arXiv identifier, finds its DOI and builds the entry; replace the DOI ending with the arXiv identifier, as the IEEE's pattern gives it.
Does IEEE cover ACM or ASCE format?
No. They are separate styles, set by ACM and ASCE, and EdCitation builds neither.
References
- Adelaide University. (2026, September 21). IEEE: How to cite. Referencing. https://au.libguides.com/referencing/ieeehowtocite
- Association for Computing Machinery. (2023, July 11). Citation style and reference formats. Archived January 7, 2026, at https://web.archive.org/web/20260107031441/https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/reference-formatting
- British Standards Institution. (2023, August 30). BS EN 1990:2023 Eurocode. Basis of structural and geotechnical design. BSI Knowledge. https://landingpage.bsigroup.com/LandingPage/Standard?UPI=000000000030392671
- GitHub. (n.d.). About CITATION files. GitHub Docs. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-citation-files
- IEEE. (2025). IEEE reference style guide for authors (Version 3.28.2025). IEEE Publication Operations. https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/IEEE_Reference_Guide.pdf
- IEEE Standards Association. (2019). IEEE 754-2019: IEEE standard for floating-point arithmetic. https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/754/6210/
- International Organization for Standardization. (2015). ISO 9001:2015 Quality management systems – Requirements. Archived September 13, 2026, at https://web.archive.org/web/20260913193716/https://www.iso.org/standard/62085.html
- Murdoch University. (2026, August 19). Datasets. IEEE referencing guide. https://libguides.murdoch.edu.au/IEEE/dataset
- Santa Clara University. (2026, February 24). Citing programming code. Citation guides for engineers. https://libguides.scu.edu/citationguides/code
- Texas Tech University. (2026, April 16). IEEE (Electrical Engineering). Citation styles for engineers. https://guides.library.ttu.edu/engineeringcitations/ieee
- University of Bath. (2026, August 18). IEEE. Referencing guide. https://library.bath.ac.uk/referencing/ieee
- Zenodo. (n.d.). FAQ versioning. https://zenodo.org/help/versioning