IEEE referencing is the numbered style of engineering and computer science, and this guide, published by EdCitation, gives its rules as the IEEE writes them. Every rule was read on 23 September 2026 in the IEEE Reference Guide, version 3.28.2025 (its Author Center address now redirects to a Google Doc), and in the IEEE Editorial Style Manual for Authors, updated on 29 July 2024.
The core fits in a line: a number in square brackets where you use a source, and a list in number order at the end. The detail is in the list, where one journal entry has nine elements to get right, two of them abbreviated. EdCitation's IEEE citation generator takes them from the publisher's record, and Verify references checks a finished list against the same records; both are free with no account. Journal authors will find the short version in the journal manuscript references checklist.
How do IEEE in-text citations work?
Put the reference number in square brackets where you use the source, "on the line, in square brackets, inside the punctuation" (IEEE, 2025). A sentence ends "of the array [4]." and never "of the array. [4]".
The first source you cite is [1], the next new one [2], and so on; a source cited again keeps its number, which also replaces any "ibid." or "op. cit." in the text. The Reference Guide never states "order of first citation" in one sentence, but it assumes it, warning that editing references may mean renumbering the list and the text, and the Editorial Style Manual's worked example renumbers later references when new ones are inserted (IEEE, 2024). Victoria University (2026) says it outright: numbers start at [1] and rise through the paper.
Numbers as nouns, and author names
A bracketed number can stand as a noun, as in "as shown in [3]"; the guide's own examples do it. The Editorial Style Manual adds three rules (IEEE, 2024):
- Write "in [1]", not "in reference [1]".
- Leave the author's name out, "in [1]" and not "In Smith [1]", unless the sentence needs it.
- Do not use a year to identify a reference in the text.
Neither document has a rule for a sentence that opens with a citation, such as "Reference [3] shows". Their examples always put a word first, as Victoria University's do ("In [3], the resulting..."), which is the safe choice. A source with three or more authors named in the text takes the first surname and "et al.": "Wood et al. [7]".
Several sources, ranges and parts of a source
Several sources at once each get their own brackets, separated by commas: [2], [4], [5]. Version 3.28.2025 changed the rule for ranges: no en dash, every number written out, so "[1]–[4]" becomes "[1], [2], [3], [4]" (IEEE, 2025).
To point to part of a source, put the detail inside the brackets: [3, pp. 5–10], [3, Fig. 1], [3, eq. (2)]. The Editorial Style Manual turns "in Fig. 2 of reference [1]" into "in [1, Fig. 2]".
How do I set out the IEEE reference list?
List every reference once, in the order of the numbers in your text, not alphabetically. The bracketed numbers sit flush left, in a column of their own.
- One source per number. Never combine references.
- Every entry has a date, at least the year. With none, "(n.d.)" goes where the date would be.
- Two months for one issue take a slash: Jul./Aug.
- Unpublished work is "to be published" once accepted and "submitted for publication" before that, never "to appear in". An early access article says "early access" with its online date and DOI.
- Private communications have a form: "A. Harrison, private communication, May 1995."
The guide also says references need not be cited in the text. That describes IEEE journals; an assignment asking for cited works only overrides it.
Author names and "et al."
Initials come first, with no comma before Jr., Sr. or III. IEEE publications list every author up to six; with more than six, the first author's name is followed by "et al." (IEEE, 2025). Other styles' rules are in when to use et al.
The DOI and the final full stop
The DOI goes last, after the date, as "doi: " and the number. Every reference ends with a full stop, including one with a DOI, unless it ends with a URL. With a DOI or access date and a URL, the DOI or date comes first, then a full stop, then the URL with nothing after it.
How are journal titles and months abbreviated in IEEE?
Use the list printed in the Reference Guide itself, "Common Abbreviations of Words in References", followed by lists of publishers and non-English journal titles. Common forms are Transactions (Trans.), Journal (J.), Proceedings (Proc.), Conference (Conf.), International (Int.), Symposium (Symp.), Engineering (Eng.), Electrical (Elect.), Communications (Commun.) and Technology (Technol.).
For a word not on the list, "-ology" stops at "-ol." (Endocrinol.), "-graphy" at "-gr." (Oceanogr.), and a compound takes its last part's abbreviation (Bioeng.). Otherwise, spell the word out.
The exceptions
- One-word titles stay whole: Science, Nature.
- Conference names drop most articles and prepositions and use numerals for ordinals: "Proceedings of the 1996 Robotics and Automation Conference" becomes "Proc. 1996 Robot. Automat. Conf." A U.S. location adds "USA".
- Look-alikes: Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng., printed in the U.K., is not Proc. IEEE.
- Months: the guide prints no month table, but its examples use three letters and a full stop (Jan., Jun., Sep.) and leave May whole. "Sept." never appears.
What do the main IEEE reference forms look like?
Each kind of source has its own order of elements. The examples are the Reference Guide's own, with its italics; the journal article was checked against the publisher's record.
| Source | Elements, in order | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Journal article | Author, “Title,” Abbrev. journal, vol., no., pp., Mon. year, doi: | M. M. Chiampi and L. L. Zilberti, “Induction of electric field in human bodies moving near MRI: An efficient BEM computational procedure,” IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 58, no. 10, pp. 2787–2793, Oct. 2011, doi: 10.1109/TBME.2011.2158315. |
| Paper in proceedings | Author, “Title,” in Abbrev. conference, year, pp., doi: | 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. |
| Paper presented, not published | Author, “Title,” presented at the conference, place, dates, year | J. G. Kreifeldt, “An analysis of surface-detected EMG as an amplitude-modulated noise,” presented at the 1989 Int. Conf. Med. Biol. Eng., Chicago, IL, USA, Nov. 9–12, 1989. |
| Book | Author, Title, ed. City, state (U.S. only), country: publisher, year. | B. Klaus and P. Horn, Robot Vision. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1986. |
| Chapter | Author, “Chapter,” in Book, Editor, Ed., place: publisher, year, pp. | L. Stein, “Random patterns,” in Computers and You, J. S. Brake, Ed., New York, NY, USA: Wiley, 1994, pp. 55–70. |
| Standard | Title, standard number, date. | IEEE Criteria for Class IE Electric Systems, IEEE Standard 308, 1969. |
| Patent | Author, “Title,” country Patent number, date. | J. P. Wilkinson, “Nonlinear resonant circuit devices,” U.S. Patent 3 624 125, Jul. 16, 1990. |
| Technical report | Author, “Title,” company, place, report number, date. | E. E. Reber, R. L. Michell, and C. J. Carter, “Oxygen absorption in the Earth’s atmosphere,” Aerospace Corp., Los Angeles, CA, USA, Tech. Rep. TR-0200 (4230-46)-3, Nov. 1988. |
| Thesis | Author, “Title,” Ph.D. dissertation or M.S. thesis, dept., univ., place, year. | J. O. Williams, “Narrow-band analyzer,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Eng., Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA, USA, 1993. |
| Web page | Author. “Page title.” Site. Accessed: date. [Online]. Available: URL | J. Smith. “Obama inaugurated as President.” CNN.com. Accessed: Feb. 1, 2009. [Online.] Available: http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/01/21/obama_inaugurated/index.html |
| Software | Author. Title. (Date). Repository. (version). Publisher. Accessed: date. [Type of medium]. Identifier. Available: URL | D. W. Arning et al. Mixed Mode–Mixed Level Circuit Simulator. (2011). Ngspice. Accessed: Jan. 11, 2019. [Online]. Available: http://ngspice.sourceforge.net |
| arXiv preprint | Author, “Title,” year, arXiv number. | S. Urazhdin, N. O. Birge, W. P. Pratt Jr., and J. Bass, “Current-driven magnetic excitations in permalloy-based multilayer nanopillars,” 2003, arXiv:0303149. |
Datasets, and what the table leaves out
For datasets, the IEEE follows the FORCE11 citation principles: the people or organisation responsible, the date, the title with its version, the distributor, and a DOI or URL, in the form "Author, Date, “Title of Dataset,” Source, doi: xxx." An article number replaces pages as "Art. no." after the year.
What an EdCitation entry gives you, and what to fix by hand
Cite a source sets journal articles and conference papers in the Reference Guide's form. The table shows what its IEEE entries print as of 23 September 2026, and where you still need to look.
| Part of the entry | What EdCitation prints | Your check |
|---|---|---|
| Journal name | The abbreviation in the publisher's record | Compare it with the guide's abbreviation list |
| Article number | "Art. no. 14045" after the date, even for an e-number the record files as a page ("Art. no. e0193972") | None: it is the guide's rule |
| Before the DOI | ", doi:" and the number | None |
| Article title | The capitals the publisher deposited | The guide's article titles run in sentence case; bring a title-case deposit down to it |
| Conference paper | The proceedings name shortened with the guide's word list, as in "Proc. 57th Annu. Meeting Assoc. Comput. Linguistics", no publisher, and ", doi:" | It adds no "Proc." that the record's name lacks, so compare the name with the proceedings as published |
What does IEEE say about DOIs, URLs and access dates?
IEEE writes a DOI as "doi: " and the number, and a URL after "[Online]. Available:", with no full stop after it. An access date reads "Accessed: Feb. 1, 2009." A long URL breaks after a slash or a full stop, or before a tilde, hyphen, underscore, question mark or percent sign, with nothing added.
The IEEE's DOI format is not the one Crossref asks for. Crossref (n.d.) has asked since March 2017 for DOIs shown as full https://doi.org/ links and says a "doi:" prefix is not a valid way to display one. In an IEEE paper, IEEE's form wins; the number is the same. More on DOIs is in what is a DOI.
Where do IEEE referencing guides disagree, and which should I follow?
Follow your journal's or department's instructions first, then the current IEEE Reference Guide.
A university library against the IEEE
Victoria University (2026), updated in June 2026, differs in three places:
- Ranges. It lists numbers "with a comma or dash between each citation"; version 3.28.2025 drops the dash.
- "Et al." in the text. It says "more than three authors", then, a few lines on, "three or more names". The IEEE says three or more.
- Books. Its example puts a comma after the title and gives "New York: Wiley", where the IEEE has a full stop and city, state and country.
The IEEE against itself
- The Reference Guide lists "Smith [4] and Brown and Jones [5]" as normal; the Style Manual allows a name beside a number only when the sentence needs it. For an IEEE journal, follow the stricter manual.
- Most forms write "[Online]. Available:", but the web page section writes "[Online.] Available:". Use the first.
- The Chiampi and Zilberti article appears once with "no. 10" and once without an issue. The publisher's record has issue 10 (Chiampi and Zilberti, 2011).
- The arXiv example gives "arXiv:0303149", but identifiers before April 2007 begin with their archive name (arXiv, n.d.), and arXiv lists that paper as cond-mat/0303149. Copy the identifier exactly.
How do I check an IEEE reference list?
- Read the text from the start, noting each number when it first appears. They should run 1, 2, 3; a new [7] before any [6] means the list is out of order.
- Match every number to one entry and every entry to a number in the text. Given the whole paper, EdCitation's Verify references does this matching both ways.
- Make sure no source appears twice and no entry holds two sources.
- Write ranges out, and put pages or figures inside the brackets: [3, Fig. 1].
- Check names: initials first, up to six authors, "et al." beyond six.
- Check abbreviations against the guide's list, whichever tool built the entry.
- Check italics: journal, proceedings, book and standard titles; article and chapter titles in quotation marks.
- Check each DOI: "doi: " before it, a full stop after it, and a number that leads to the paper named.
- Check each URL: "[Online]. Available:" before it and nothing after it.
- Look every entry up in the publisher's record and screen it for retracted papers. Paste the list into Verify references to do both at once: a doubtful entry comes back marked "check this", and one it could not check is never passed off as not found.
How does EdCitation build and check an IEEE list?
EdCitation is the best tool for an IEEE reference list. Every entry it gives is read from the publisher's record, none is composed, and no chatbot can say that of the references it produces. Even IEEE's own guide prints the Chiampi and Zilberti article once without its issue; the publisher's record has issue 10. Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, ISBN or title into Cite a source: it finds the work, lays the entry out in IEEE or any of five other styles, gives the bracketed citation and screens the source for retraction. The public page builds one reference at a time, free with no account; the IEEE style page shows its pattern.
Sign up free and your lists are kept in the dashboard. There, IEEE entries take their numbers from the sequence in which you save them: save each source when you first cite it and the list's [1], [2], [3] line up with the text. Copy the list with its italics intact, or download it for Word, for LaTeX as BibTeX, or for a reference manager as RIS.
Verify references, also free with no account, checks the finished list. It sorts the entries three ways, verified, "check this" or not found, flags any retraction, and keeps a reference it could not reach under "could not check" instead of calling it missing. Upload the whole paper instead and it also pairs each bracketed number with its entry, then checks that no entry goes uncited.
The paid plans go further. Pro ($8 a month) brings References from a file, a file-based check of every reference and every citation, plus plagiarism and AI checks on credits; its Mechanics QA judges layout by the APA 7 student paper alone, which makes it no use for IEEE layout. Max ($24 a month) adds Theoretics QA and the Library. Details are on the pricing page.
What it does not do: EdCitation leaves the numbering of citations in your draft to a reference manager or to LaTeX with BibTeX, a split that citation generator, reference manager or checker explains, and it never writes any part of a paper.
Quick questions
Does IEEE use et al. in the text?
Yes. For a source with three or more authors named in the text, the IEEE Reference Guide gives the first surname and "et al."; the list names up to six authors.
Can I write [1]–[4] for a range in IEEE?
Not under version 3.28.2025 of the IEEE Reference Guide, which writes every number out: [1], [2], [3], [4]. Some university guides still allow a dash.
Is an IEEE reference list in alphabetical order?
No. An IEEE reference list is in number order, and the numbers follow the order in which sources are first cited in the text.
How do I cite an arXiv preprint in IEEE?
Give the authors, the title in quotation marks, the year and the arXiv identifier, copied exactly as arXiv shows it. Once the publisher has the article online, the IEEE Reference Guide says to cite that version instead.
Does IEEE write DOIs as links?
No. The IEEE Reference Guide writes "doi: " and the number at the end of the entry, before the final full stop, although Crossref asks for a https://doi.org/ link.
Can I make an IEEE reference from a DOI for free?
Yes. Paste the DOI into EdCitation's free IEEE citation generator and the journal entry comes from the publisher's record, with the abbreviated journal name, "Art. no." for an article number and ", doi:" at the end. A conference paper gets its proceedings name shortened with the guide's own abbreviations, as in "2016 IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. (CVPR)"; only a title deposited in title case needs recasing by hand.
References
- arXiv. (n.d.). Understanding the arXiv identifier. arXiv Help. https://info.arxiv.org/help/arxiv_identifier.html
- Chiampi, M. M., & Zilberti, L. L. (2011). Induction of electric field in human bodies moving near MRI: An efficient BEM computational procedure. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 58(10), 2787–2793. https://doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2011.2158315
- Crossref. (n.d.). Display guidelines. https://www.crossref.org/display-guidelines/
- IEEE. (2024). IEEE editorial style manual for authors. IEEE Author Center. https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/IEEE-Editorial-Style-Manual-for-Authors.pdf
- IEEE. (2025). IEEE reference style guide for authors (Version 3.28.2025). IEEE Author Center. https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/IEEE_Reference_Guide.pdf
- Victoria University. (2026). IEEE referencing: Citing sources in the text. Victoria University Library. https://libraryguides.vu.edu.au/ieeereferencing/CitingSources