FormattingNerd

IEEE Reference Examples

IEEE references are numbered [1], [2], [3] in the order you first cite them — not alphabetized. Note the pattern: the author's initials come before the surname, the article or paper title goes in "quotation marks," and the journal, book, or proceedings name is in italics.

Journal article (with a DOI)

[1] J. K. Author and M. H. Writer, "A study of recurrent neural networks," IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. Learn. Syst., vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 100–120, Apr. 2020, doi: 10.1109/TNNLS.2020.123456.

Conference paper

[2] R. Lee, "Edge inference on mobile devices," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. (ICCV), Seattle, WA, USA, 2021, pp. 45–52.

Whole book

[3] S. M. Brown, Digital Signal Processing, 2nd ed. New York, NY, USA: McGraw-Hill, 2018.

Web page

[4] IEEE. "IEEE author center." Accessed: Jun. 1, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org

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The list itself is numbered in citation order with a hanging indent. See the full IEEE format checker, or compare styles in APA vs MLA vs Chicago.