This IEEE citation generator produces references in the numbered style used across electrical engineering, computer science and the IEEE journals and conference proceedings. Paste a DOI, a paper title or a URL and the generator retrieves the real record from CrossRef and OpenAlex before formatting it. IEEE is unforgiving about author initials, abbreviated journal titles and punctuation, which is exactly the kind of detail worth automating.
Your formatted reference will appear here, with the database record it came from.
Real Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) style references, formatted the way electrical engineering and computer science coursework expects them.
Journal article
[1] J. A. Smith and B. C. Jones, "Low-latency scheduling for edge inference," IEEE Trans. Mobile Comput., vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 1180–1192, Apr. 2024.
Conference paper
[2] M. Alvarez, "A cache-aware routing heuristic," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Commun. (ICC), Denver, CO, USA, 2023, pp. 44–49.
Book
[3] N. Okafor, Digital Signal Processing, 3rd ed. New York, NY, USA: Meridian, 2022.
IEEE is a numeric style. Sources are numbered in the order they first appear in your text, and that same number is reused every time the source is cited again. The number goes in square brackets on the line, not as a superscript, and the reference list is ordered by number rather than alphabetically.
as shown in [1], [3]–[5]
Citing a website in IEEE follows the same numbered pattern. Give the author or organisation, the page title in quotation marks, the name of the site, the URL, and an access date in parentheses. IEEE asks for the access date because web pages are not archival sources.
[4] IEEE Standards Association. "IEEE 802.11 working group." IEEE. https://www.ieee802.org/11/ (accessed Aug. 19, 2026).
It formats each reference with a bracketed number. Because IEEE numbering depends on the order sources appear in your own text, check that the order matches your draft before submitting.
Journal abbreviations come from the record returned by CrossRef where the publisher supplies one. IEEE abbreviations follow a fixed word list, so it is worth a quick look at unusual titles.
The reference style is the same across IEEE journals, IEEE Access and IEEE conference proceedings. What changes between them is the manuscript template (margins, headings and abstract length), not how references are written.
Standards are cited by title, standard number and year, for example IEEE Standard 802.11, 2020. Datasheets are treated like web or corporate documents, with the manufacturer as author and an access date.
Yes. arXiv papers are matched by DOI or arXiv identifier, and the preprint status is kept in the reference so a reviewer can see the work has not been peer reviewed.