IEEE Quick Links
- IEEE Citation GuidelinesContains a formal set of editorial guidelines for IEEE Transactions, Journals, and Letters
- IEEE Reference List GuideOutlines how to cite a variety of references in IEEE style
Citing with IEEE
Introduction
The IEEE citation style is now widely used in electrical, electronic and computing publications. IEEE provides instructions for authors for each type of publication such as journals, magazines, newsletters, and standards. Please note: IEEE has stated Artificial Intelligence (AI) outputs, including products of chatbots, are not cited for publication purposes. In-text references can be treated as a personal/private communication.
IEEE is a numbered style with two components:
- In-text references where references are numbered [1] in the order of appearance in the article.
- A reference list, displayed at the end of the article which provides full details of all references cited in-text. The references are ordered as they appear in the in-text references (in order of citation, not in alphabetical order).
For further information, please refer to the guidelines on IEEE Documentation Style from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers site.
In-text references
Using this system, references are numbered in the order in which they are first cited in the text. If the same reference is cited later in the text, the same number is given. For example:
"Another alternative to mitigate sensor occlusions is to rely on external road sensing infrastructure [8]."
"However, most decision-making approaches for autonomous vehicles to date assume complete knowledge of the states of dynamic objects in the environment [1–6], even if such objects...."
ChatGPT in IEEE
IEEE has developed guidelines on citing ChatGPT use in their style. They recommend using their "Software" category.
Template for Software citing:
Author firstname initial. Lastname. Title of Software. Date Repository or Archive. (version or year). Publisher Name. Accessed: Date (when applicable). [Type of Medium]. Global Persistent Identifier. Available: site/path/file
Example citation:
To include the subject of the interaction and the prompt used, follow this example:
Labelling Figures
Here is an example of a figure appearing in a paper published by IEEE on autonomous underwater vehicles. The spelling error is the fault of the authors and peer reviewers.
| Rule | Fig. #. Caption of figure. (x) Caption of part (if applicable). (x) Caption of part (if applicable). [#] |
| Example | Fig. 1. Concept of regional underwater positioning and communication system for multiple AUVs control. |
| Guidelines | -Always place the Figure title/caption below the figure -The Figure, and Figure title/captions must be center-justified (the caption is not centered in the example above) -When referring to multiple parts of figures: Use the singular Fig., not Figs. (e.g. Fig. 4(a) and 4(b)). -Still unsure? Refer to the IEEE Style Manual (2018) |
Figures can also be more complex. Here is a figure from a paper written by three EECS faculty members at the University of Michigan, on autonomous vehicle decision-making. It has multiple sections and an extensive caption.
Figure from the paper "Augmented vehicle tracking under occlusions for decision-making in autonomous driving" from IEEE Xplore.
Citing Figures
When citing figures you did not create yourself, cite the document they appear in.
For example, if using this portion of a figure from the Augmented Vehicle Tracking paper above:
Fig. 3. Simulated intersection handling.
Source: Adapted from [2]
Then in your list of References, the article is listed normally in IEEE style.
[2] E. Galceran, E. Olson, and R. M. Eustice, “Augmented vehicle tracking under occlusions for decision-making in autonomous driving,” in 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Hamburg, Germany, 2015, pp. 3559–3565.