IEEE Citation Style

IEEE Style¶

The IEEE is the largest international professional association in the field of Electrical Engineering. As such, it is also a publisher of many scientific journals and other periodicals, conference proceedings and standards, and is very influential in this regard. The so-called IEEE Style is in many cases the preferred style guide for many types of documents in the field. Formatting of citations and bibliographies is an important element of style, and as such the IEEE citation style is preferred for the course lab (and for many other reports and documents during your education, usually including your BSc thesis, for that matter).

For the IP-1 reports, you are not required to follow the exact detailed rules as outlined in the official IEEE style guides, but it is recommended to follow the most distinctive aspects of this style.

Citations versus References¶

Citations and references serve different but complementary purposes in academic and technical writing:

• Citations are brief indicators within the text that point to sources of information. In IEEE style, these appear as numbered references in square brackets [1], [2], etc.

• References are the complete bibliographic entries that provide full publication details, typically listed at the end of the document in a “References” section. In IEEE style they appear as a numbered list in order of first citation, with the numbers again in rectangular brackets.

Think of citations as “pointers” in your text that direct readers to the full source information found in your reference list. Every citation in your text must have a corresponding reference entry and every reference should be cited at least once in your text.

IEEE Style Citations¶

Citations in IEEE style are numbered in order of first appearance, surrounded between rectangular brackets and placed before the final punctuation mark (period, comma, semicolon, etc.) and have no space between the citation and the preceding word:

Correct examples:

• “The measurement results show good agreement with theoretical predictions [5].”

• “Several studies have investigated this phenomenon [3], [7], [12].”

• “As demonstrated by Smith et al. [8], the proposed method offers significant advantages.”

Incorrect examples:

• “The results are promising [5] .” (space before period)

• “The results are promising. [5]” (citation after period)

• “Several studies [3] , [7] , [12] have shown...” (spaces around commas)

When citing multiple sources, use separate brackets with commas and spaces between them:

• Multiple non-consecutive: “This has been confirmed by various researchers [2], [5], [9].”

• Consecutive references: “Recent studies [4]–[7] have explored this topic extensively.”

When mentioning author names in the text, the citation immediately follows the name:

• “According to Johnson [11], the optimal frequency range is between 2-5 kHz.”

• “The work by Chen and Liu [15] provides the theoretical foundation for this approach.”

IEEE Style References¶

The references are placed in a list at the end of the document, in a dedicated section called ‘References’. This section is also called the Bibliography section.

Main Consideration: All citation styles, IEEE and other styles such as APA, require the bibliography items to be complete and precise enough to allow readers to both retrieve the original source and properly attribute the author.

• The bibliography is a list of references at the end of the document, ordered numerically by order of first appearance in the text, and numbered with square brackets (e.g., [1], [2]).

• List all authors in the format Initials. Lastname (e.g., J. D. Smith). Use the first author followed by “et al.” if too many authors.

• If no individual author is listed, use the organization or corporation name as the author.

• Titles of articles, chapters, and papers are enclosed in quotation marks. Titles of books and journals are italicized.

• For online documents, include the author(s), title, year, Available: full URL, and Accessed: date [Month DD, YYY].