Citing a website in IEEE follows the same numbered pattern as every other IEEE reference, with one addition: an access date. IEEE asks for it because web pages are not archival sources, and this page shows exactly where it goes along with the quotation-mark and abbreviation rules that make IEEE distinctive.
An IEEE web reference is a bracketed number followed by five parts. The order is fixed and the punctuation between them is what distinguishes IEEE from the numeric styles used in medicine.
IEEE cites everything by number. A web source gets the same treatment as a journal paper: a bracketed number assigned in order of first appearance, reused every time you mention the source again.
Single source: The standard defines three modes [1].
Several sources: as reported in [1], [3], [7]
A range: as shown in [1]–[4]
As a sentence element: Reference [1] describes the protocol in detail.
Organisation as author
[1] IEEE Standards Association. “IEEE 802.11 working group.” IEEE. https://www.ieee802.org/11/ (accessed Aug. 20, 2026).
Named author
[2] N. Okafor. “Why sleep debt compounds.” Sleep Science Review. https://example.com/sleep-debt (accessed Aug. 20, 2026).
Technical documentation
[3] NVIDIA. “CUDA C++ programming guide.” NVIDIA Developer. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/ (accessed Aug. 20, 2026).
Engineering sources often look like web pages while actually being something with a proper citable form. These are the distinctions worth making.
| A GitHub repository | Owner as author, repository name in quotation marks, GitHub as the site, plus an access date. Use a Zenodo DOI if the project mints one. |
|---|---|
| A datasheet | Manufacturer as author, document title and number, then URL and access date. Datasheets are revised silently, so the date matters. |
| An IEEE standard | Cite it as a standard by title, number and year. Do not cite the page that hosts it. |
| An arXiv preprint | Cite by arXiv identifier, not by URL, and label it as a preprint. |
| Vendor documentation | Company as author, page title in quotation marks, documentation site name, URL and access date. |
| A blog post by a named engineer | Initials before surname as with any IEEE author, then the post title and the site. |
Engineering writing has a habit of citing a URL for something that has a proper citable form, and IEEE reviewers notice. Before writing a web reference, it is worth asking whether the thing you are citing is really a web page or something else that happens to live on the web.
Standards are the clearest case. A standard has a number and a year, and IEEE cites it by those rather than by URL, because the number is stable and the hosting page is not. Software releases are similar: many projects mint a DOI through Zenodo for each release, and citing that DOI is both more precise and more durable than citing a repository URL that points at whatever the default branch contains today.
The same applies to preprints and technical reports. An arXiv paper has an identifier, a report has a number, and a dataset in a research repository has a DOI. A URL is the right locator only when there genuinely is no identifier, which for a company documentation page or a blog post is usually the case, and for anything published through a scholarly channel usually is not.
Yes. Unlike APA, which asks for one only on pages that change, IEEE treats every web source as needing an access date, because a web page has no fixed version the way a published paper does.
Treat it as a web source: the owner or organisation as author, the repository name in quotation marks, GitHub as the site, the URL, and an access date. If the project has issued a release DOI through Zenodo, cite that instead, since it is stable.
Give the manufacturer as author, the document title in quotation marks, the document number if there is one, and then the URL with an access date. Datasheets are revised silently, so the access date matters more here than usual.
For a plain web page, no. The page title sits in quotation marks and the site name is plain. Italics are for journal and book titles, which a web page does not have.
Start with the page title in quotation marks, then the site name. In engineering writing this usually indicates a low-quality source, so it is worth asking whether a better one exists.
In parentheses at the very end, with the month abbreviated: (accessed Aug. 20, 2026). IEEE abbreviates all months except May, June and July.
IEEE lists all authors in the reference list regardless of number, and this differs from the medical numeric styles that cut off at six. Web sources rarely have long author lists, so it seldom comes up here.
Follow your venue's template. IEEE conference and journal templates generally want plain text rather than styled links, because the reference list is typeset from the source file.