IEEE style is the citation system of electrical engineering, computer science, software engineering, electronics, and most of the broader engineering disciplines. If your work targets an IEEE journal or a conference run by IEEE or one of its sister societies, IEEE style is the system the editors expect.
The canonical references are the IEEE Reference Guide (covering citations and reference list entries) and the IEEE Editorial Style Manual (covering grammar, usage, and broader editorial conventions). Both are published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and available from ieee.org. This blog post is an orientation. It is not a rulebook and does not replace the IEEE documents when you need the canonical answer to a specific question.
Where IEEE style came from and who uses it
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is the largest technical professional society in the world. It publishes hundreds of journals, runs thousands of conferences, and sets technical standards across electronics, computing, communications, and adjacent fields. IEEE style grew out of that publishing apparatus and reflects the needs of dense, fast-moving technical writing.
Disciplines that use IEEE include electrical engineering, computer science, software engineering, electronics, robotics, signal processing, control systems, telecommunications, power engineering, and many materials and biomedical engineering subfields that publish in IEEE journals. Several adjacent communities (some operations research, some applied mathematics, some quantitative biology) adopt IEEE-like conventions for their own work even when they are not publishing with IEEE directly.
The mechanics: spelling, punctuation, and usage
IEEE inherits American English conventions, in keeping with its US-based origin and its dominant US-and-international academic publishing reach.
Spelling
American spelling is the default. Where multiple American spellings exist, Merriam-Webster is the conventional tiebreaker. Technical terms with field-specific conventions (impedance, gauge, fibre versus fiber in optical-fibre contexts) follow whichever spelling the relevant technical community has settled on; the Editorial Style Manual is explicit about the field-specific cases.
Punctuation
American punctuation. Commas and periods sit inside closing quotation marks. The serial comma is used in lists of three or more items. IEEE writing tends to be precise and structurally tight, and the punctuation conventions support that: short sentences, frequent semicolons in lists of mathematical or technical items, and parentheses for asides that other styles would set off with commas.
Numbers and units
IEEE is dense with numbers, and the conventions reflect that. Most numbers in technical writing appear as figures, including small whole numbers when they are quantities or measurements. The space between a number and its unit follows SI conventions, including the use of a non-breaking space where appropriate. Equations are numbered consecutively and referenced in the text by number.
Capitalisation and italics
Article titles in references use sentence case (capitalizing only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns). Journal and conference proceeding titles use title case and are italic. Book titles are italic and use title case. Variables in equations and in the running text are italic; functions and operators are roman.
The citation system, at a glance
IEEE uses a numeric citation system. Every cited source is assigned a unique number, in the order it is first cited in the text, and that number is used to refer to the source in every subsequent citation. The number appears in the running text inside square brackets at the point of citation. The full bibliographic information for each numbered source appears in the reference list at the end of the paper, in numeric order matching the citation sequence.
Unlike author-date systems, IEEE citations carry no author or year in the running text. The bracketed number does all the work, and the reader looks up the full information in the reference list when they want to see what is being cited.
In-text citations
IEEE citations are minimal in the body. The bracketed number sits inline at the point where the citation belongs, with a space before the opening bracket. The number can stand alone or be incorporated into the grammar of the sentence.
Examples to internalize
Four bracketed citations following IEEE conventions. Sources are invented for illustration.
- Single citation: The convergence rate of the proposed algorithm is sublinear [3].
- Citation incorporated into the sentence: As shown in [3], the convergence rate is sublinear.
- Multiple citations together: Several recent studies have considered the problem [3], [7], [11].
- Citation with specific page or section reference: Detailed analysis is given in [3, sec. 4.2] or [3, p. 47] for a specific page.
The reference list
The reference list starts on a new page after the body of the paper with the heading References at the top. Entries are numbered in the order they first appear in the text, formatted with a hanging indent. The numbered entries are wrapped in square brackets to match the in-text citation form.
Each entry follows the four-part skeleton: who, when, what, where, with elements separated by commas. The exact form depends on whether the source is a journal article, a conference paper, a book, a chapter, a standard, or an online resource. IEEE has settled forms for each type.
Examples to internalize
Four sample reference list entries. All authors and titles are invented.
- Journal article: [1] A. C. Okonkwo and R. Patel, “Convergence properties of a class of iterative estimators,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 70, no. 4, pp. 1234–1245, Apr. 2022, doi: 10.1109/tsp.2022.001234.
- Conference paper: [2] J. Choi and M. Stein, “A scalable approach to distributed inference,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust. Speech Signal Process., Seoul, South Korea, May 2021, pp. 88–92.
- Book: [3] M. Stein, Quiet Revisions: Editing as a Craft. Chicago, IL, USA: Bracewell Press, 2019.
- Online resource: [4] R. Patel, “Form and feeling in recent criticism,” Modern Letters Rev., Mar. 14, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://example.org/mlr/12345.
Things to remember about the reference list
- Numeric order matching the order of first citation in the text. Not alphabetical.
- Square brackets around the entry number at the start of each entry.
- Author initials first, then surname (rather than the surname-first inversion used in many other styles).
- Sentence case for article and chapter titles, inside quotation marks.
- Title case and italic for journal titles, conference proceeding titles, and book titles.
- Abbreviated journal namesfollowing IEEE’s standard journal-title abbreviations.
- DOIs and URLs as appropriate; online sources use the [Online]. Available: pattern.
Footnotes in IEEE
IEEE uses footnotes sparingly. Citations belong in the bracketed numeric system, not in footnotes. Footnotes are reserved for content notes: brief asides, author affiliations on the title page, and acknowledgements. Many IEEE journals discourage footnotes in the body of the paper, preferring acknowledgements at the end and content notes integrated into the text or moved to an appendix.
What RightMyWork does with IEEE
When you pick IEEE on the upload screen, the editor applies IEEE conventions across your document. In-text citations are checked for the bracketed-number format. Reference list entries are reviewed for the IEEE element order, abbreviated journal names, sentence-case article titles, italic on the right elements, and the bracketed-number prefix. The numeric ordering against citation appearance in the text is checked, and any reference list entries that are never cited (or any in-text citations that point to numbers without matching reference list entries) are flagged.
Every change lands as a tracked change in Word. Where the editor cannot confidently apply a rule (an unusual source type, an unfamiliar journal abbreviation), it surfaces a query rather than rewriting silently.
Where to go from here
For the rules in their canonical form, the IEEE Reference Guide and the IEEE Editorial Style Manual together cover citations, reference list entries, grammar, usage, and the broader editorial conventions. Both are available from ieee.org. Both are produced by the people who define the style for IEEE publications.
When you are ready to apply IEEE to your draft, the upload form on the homepage is one click away. The first 3,000 words on a new account are free.