IEEE Citation Generator

How this IEEE citation generator numbers references and formats the in-text citation

IEEE numbers references in order of first citation, not alphabetically. This matters more than it sounds: the order you paste sources in becomes the numbering, so paste them in the order they appear in your paper and the numbers come out right. Every other style on this site sorts alphabetically instead.

A journal article, a many-author paper, and a book:

[1] Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, "Deep learning and the future of machine vision," Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436-444, 2015, doi: 10.1038/nature14539.

[2] K. Abe et al., "A clinical trial of something," The Lancet, vol. 397, pp. 100-110, 2021.

[3] W. Zhang, A book about things. London: Example Press, 2019.

Initials come before the surname, which is the reverse of APA and MLA. Article titles are sentence case in quotation marks; journal and book titles are italic. That third example is what an ieee book citation looks like, and books keep the publisher location where journal articles have volume and issue.

In text, the citation is just the bracketed number: [1]. There is no author name and no year, so IEEE citation in text is the same mark wherever it appears in the sentence, and there is no narrative form to choose. With a page number it becomes [1, p. 440], which is the one place a locator appears in this style.

Getting IEEE references into LaTeX with IEEEtran

If you are writing an IEEE paper you are probably in LaTeX, and in that case you do not want formatted references at all. You want a .bib file and you want IEEEtran.bst to do the formatting at compile time, so the numbering stays correct as you add and reorder citations.

Switch the output to BibTeX and you get entries you can paste straight into your .bib. The DOI to BibTeX converter and the arXiv to BibTeX converter take the same inputs and default to that output, which is usually the faster route for a paper in progress.

Two things worth knowing when you go that way. The .bib output preserves UTF-8 accented characters rather than converting them to LaTeX macros, which is what you want for biblatex and modern pdflatex setups; there is a legacy BibTeX output if your toolchain needs the macros instead. And the entry type is inferred from the source record, so a conference paper that CrossRef has tagged as a journal article will come through as @article. There is a per-row override on the BibTeX output for exactly that case, and conference papers are the ones to check.

Lookups need a DOI, arXiv ID, PubMed ID, or ISBN. IEEE standards themselves, datasheets, and technical reports often have none of these, so those entries you write by hand.