Engineering & Computer Science
IEEE Citation Generator
Create accurate IEEE references for journal articles, conference papers, books, and websites. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on the IEEE Reference Guide
Your IEEE citation will appear here
Paste a source above to generate a verified reference.
Which one did you mean?
None of these? .
- Free forever
- No sign-up
- Verified data, not AI
IEEE uses numbered citations
References are numbered in order of appearance. In-text citations use square brackets, such as [1].
- Single source
- [1]
- Range
- [3]–[5]
IEEE citation examples by source type
Journal titles are abbreviated, the article title sits in quotation marks, and the DOI closes the reference when the article has one.
[1] M. Jinek, K. Chylinski, I. Fonfara, M. Hauer, J. A. Doudna, and E. Charpentier, "A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity," Science, vol. 337, no. 6096, pp. 816–821, Aug. 2012, doi: 10.1126/science.1225829.
Six authors or fewer: name every one of them.
[2] C. E. Shannon, "A mathematical theory of communication," Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 379–423, Jul. 1948.
Older articles simply end after the date. Do not invent an identifier.
[3] G. Hinton et al., "Deep neural networks for acoustic modeling in speech recognition: The shared views of four research groups," IEEE Signal Process. Mag., vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 82–97, Nov. 2012, doi: 10.1109/MSP.2012.2205597.
Above six names, IEEE prints the first author followed by et al.
[4] A. B. Author and C. D. Author, "Title of paper," IEEE Trans. Journal Name, early access, Mon. DD, YYYY, doi: 10.1109/XXXXX.YYYY.NNNNNNN.
No volume, issue or pages yet: write "early access" and keep the DOI.
Conference papers take "in" before the abbreviated proceedings title. This is the reference type IEEE authors get wrong most often.
[5] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, "Deep residual learning for image recognition," in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2016, pp. 770–778, doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.90.
[6] J. Devlin, M.-W. Chang, K. Lee, and K. Toutanova, "BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding," in Proc. NAACL-HLT, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2019, pp. 4171–4186.
[7] A. Vaswani et al., "Attention is all you need," in Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst., 2017, pp. 5998–6008.
The et al. rule applies to every source type, not just journals.
[8] A. B. Author, "Title of paper," presented at the Conf. Name, City, State, Country, Mon. DD–DD, YYYY.
Book titles are italicised. The edition follows the title, then place of publication, publisher and year.
[9] S. Russell and P. Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Pearson, 2020.
Give the city, state and country of publication.
[10] I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville, Deep Learning. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2016.
[11] A. B. Author, "Title of chapter," in Title of Book, C. D. Editor, Ed. City, State, Country: Publisher, YYYY, pp. 10–25.
[12] A. B. Author, Title of Book. City, State, Country: Publisher, YYYY. [Online]. Available: https://example.com/book
Online sources end with an access date and the full URL, including https://. A bare host name is not a valid IEEE reference.
[13] IEEE. "IEEE Reference Guide." IEEE Author Center. Accessed: Aug. 15, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/IEEE-Reference-Guide.pdf
Company and standards bodies are printed as written, never inverted.
[14] A. B. Author, "Title of page." Site Name. (Mon. DD, YYYY). Accessed: Mon. DD, YYYY. [Online]. Available: https://example.com/page
[15] A. B. Author, "Title of page." Site Name. Accessed: Mon. DD, YYYY. [Online]. Available: https://example.com/page
Leave the date out entirely rather than guessing one.
Standards keep their designation instead of a publisher. Technical reports keep the issuing body and report number.
[16] IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, IEEE Standard 754-2019, Jul. 2019.
[17] A. B. Author, "Title of report," Issuing Body, City, State, Country, Rep. NNNN, Mon. YYYY.
[18] "Part number and description," Manufacturer, City, State, Country. (Mon. YYYY). Accessed: Mon. DD, YYYY. [Online]. Available: https://example.com/datasheet.pdf
Theses name the degree, the department and the awarding institution. The title stays in quotation marks, not italics.
[19] A. B. Author, "Title of dissertation," Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Eng., Univ. Name, City, State, Country, YYYY.
[20] A. B. Author, "Title of thesis," M.S. thesis, Dept. Comput. Sci., Univ. Name, City, State, Country, YYYY.
[21] A. B. Author, "Title of thesis," M.S. thesis, Dept. Comput. Sci., Univ. Name, City, State, Country, YYYY. [Online]. Available: https://example.com/thesis
Build your IEEE bibliography
- [1] A. Vaswani et al., "Attention is all you need," in Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst., 2017, pp. 5998–6008.
- [2] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, "Deep residual learning for image recognition," in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2016, pp. 770–778, doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.90.
- [3] M. Jinek, K. Chylinski, I. Fonfara, M. Hauer, J. A. Doudna, and E. Charpentier, "A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity," Science, vol. 337, no. 6096, pp. 816–821, Aug. 2012, doi: 10.1126/science.1225829.
- [4] T. B. Brown et al., "Language models are few-shot learners," in Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst., 2020, pp. 1877–1901.
- Saved in your browser Your bibliography is stored locally.
- No account required 100% private. Always free.
- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
IEEE citation rules at a glance
- Reference order Number sources by first appearance in the text, not alphabetically.
- In-text citations Use square brackets on the line: [1], or [2]–[4] for a run of sources.
- Author names Initials come before surnames: J. A. Doudna, never Doudna, J. A.
- More than six authors Name up to six authors. Above six, print the first author followed by et al.
- Titles Article and chapter titles take quotation marks; book and journal titles are italicised.
- Journal names Use the standard abbreviation: IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.
Checked against the IEEE Reference Guide · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon IEEE citation mistakes
- Alphabetising the reference list IEEE lists sources in citation order. Sorting by author renumbers every citation in the text.
- Using 1. instead of [1] The number sits in square brackets, both in the list and in the sentence.
- Listing all authors past six Seven names or more collapse to the first author plus et al.; a full list is a formatting error.
- Writing surnames before initials That is APA order. IEEE puts initials first everywhere except the index.
- Leaving journal names unabbreviated Spell-out titles are rejected by most IEEE journals. Use the standard abbreviation list.
- Missing access dates for online sources Anything cited from the web needs "Accessed:" plus the full URL, including https://.
IEEE quick reference (one page, PDF)
Element order for every source type, the author rules, in-text brackets, and the journal abbreviations students hit most often. Print it, or hand it to a seminar group.
- Reference patterns for eight source types
- The six-author rule with worked examples
- In-text bracket forms, including ranges and multiple sources
- Common abbreviations for IEEE journals and proceedings
IEEE citation generator FAQ
Is this IEEE citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export IEEE citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
How are IEEE references numbered?
By order of first appearance in your text. The bibliography keeps that order, so reference [1] is the first source you cite. Our builder numbers the list for you as you add sources.
What does an IEEE in-text citation look like?
A bracketed number on the line of text: … as shown in [1]. Consecutive sources are written [3]–[5]; separate ones are written [2], [7].
Can I cite a conference paper in IEEE style?
Yes. Paste the DOI and the generator produces the "in Proc. …" form with the abbreviated proceedings title, place and page range. The conference paper tab shows four worked cases.
Where does the citation metadata come from?
Crossref for DOIs, Open Library for ISBNs, and PubMed for biomedical articles. Nothing is written by a language model, so a volume or page range is either verified or left blank for you to fill in. See our methodology.
Can I export an IEEE bibliography to Word?
Yes. Copy the numbered list straight into your document, or download it as DOCX or TXT. BibTeX export is available for LaTeX users.
Create your IEEE citation now.
Free, no sign-up, and your bibliography stays in your browser.