Need a different style?
The full Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, ACS, IEEE, Vancouver, and the 10,000+ other styles in the CSL registry.
Paste a DOI, URL, or ISBN. Get back a clean reference in IEEE style — the format used across every IEEE journal and most engineering and computer-science publications. Numbered references in square brackets, abbreviated journal names. Free, no signup.
Tip: Paste a URL, DOI, or ISBN for automatic metadata lookup.
IEEE style is defined by the IEEE Reference Guide, maintained by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It's the default for IEEE journals, IEEE conferences, ACM proceedings (with a near-identical variant), and most engineering, computer-science, telecommunications, and signal-processing publications. The numbered-bracket in-text format is one of its trademarks: compact, easy to scan, and well-suited to dense technical writing with high citation counts.
[1] A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, "Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases," Science, vol. 185, no. 4157, pp. 1124–1131, Sep. 1974, doi: 10.1126/science.185.4157.1124.
IEEE uses numbered citations in square brackets: [1], [2]. Numbers appear in the order each source is first cited. Multiple citations stack: [1], [3], [7] or as a range [1]–[3]. Brackets are part of the sentence's grammar — you can write "as shown in [4]" or "recent work [4] demonstrates...".
Recent work has shown improved throughput [1], [2].
References are numbered in citation order, not alphabetized. Author names: first initial(s) then surname, comma-separated, with "and" before the final author. Article titles use sentence case and sit in double quotation marks. Journal names use the IEEE-standard abbreviation and stay italicized. Volume, issue, page range, and month-year follow in the IEEE-specific punctuation: vol. 185, no. 4157, pp. 1124–1131, Sep. 1974.
A. Tversky), not the surname first.Jan., Feb., Sep.), with a period.Each input goes through the right source. DOIs hit Crossref directly, since that's where they're registered. ISBNs resolve through library and publisher records. URLs get scraped for embedded metadata (DOI in the source, OG tags, schema.org). If nothing's there, we fall back to Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Once the canonical record lands, the CSL engine renders the citation in IEEE. That's the same engine Zotero and Mendeley run, the same one behind most journal submission portals.
IEEE and ACM publishing both use numbered references — but ACM allows either bracketed numbers or author-date, while IEEE is bracketed-numbers only. The reference-list formatting is nearly identical between the two; minor differences in punctuation around publisher info and DOIs. The generator's IEEE output works for ACM submissions in most cases; pick the ACM-specific CSL style from the More menu for an exact match.
List the authors, the paper title in quotation marks, the conference proceedings name in italics (with abbreviations), city of conference, month and year, and the page range. The generator handles this automatically when you paste a DOI from an IEEE Xplore or ACM Digital Library page.
For online-only sources, yes. For journal articles with a DOI, the DOI replaces the URL — format it as doi: 10.xxxx at the end of the reference. The generator picks the right form based on the source type.
List every author up to six. Seven or more: list the first author and use "et al.". Always use "and" before the final author (A. Tversky, D. Kahneman, and B. Smith), never just commas.
Yes. If you cite the same paper four times, every citation uses the same bracketed number. Don't renumber — IEEE assigns the number on first appearance and you reuse it everywhere else.
Our IEEE citation style guide walks through the rules in detail, with examples for journal articles, conference papers, books, standards documents, and patents.
The full Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, ACS, IEEE, Vancouver, and the 10,000+ other styles in the CSL registry.
Already wrote your references in another style? Drop the list into the Citation Converter to reformat the whole bibliography in one click.
Got a reference and want to check it? Run it through the AI Citation Checker to confirm the source exists and the metadata matches.
Have a sentence but no citation? The Find Source tool searches Crossref, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, OpenAlex, and PubMed for supporting peer-reviewed papers.
Save every IEEE citation you generate to your Works Cited library, then export the finished list to Word, BibTeX, or RIS.
Run the final draft through the Writing Assistant to check grammar, clarity, and academic tone before submitting.