IEEE Citation Generator
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste a DOI, arXiv ID, PubMed ID or ISBN and get numbered IEEE references, [1], [2], [3], in the order you cite them. Writing in LaTeX? Take the BibTeX output instead and let IEEEtran format the list for you.
How to create IEEE citations
Step 1
Paste your sources in citation order
IEEE numbers references in the order they first appear in your paper, so paste them in that order. Up to 50, one per line, or upload a .bib, RIS, EndNote or PubMed export.
Step 2
Choose Reference list
IEEE is already the style. Reference list numbers the whole set [1] to [n]. Single citation formats each source on its own; In-text citation gives the bracket number.
Step 3
Copy
Copy all takes the numbered list with its italics, ready for Word or Google Docs.
IEEE reference format by source type
Real references from the generator.
Journal article
[1] Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, “Deep learning,” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436–444, May 2015, doi: 10.1038/nature14539.
Conference paper (from a .bib entry)
[2] A. Vaswani et al., “Attention is all you need,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2017, pp. 5998–6008.
Book
[3] D. Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin, 2012.
Chapter in an edited book (from a .bib entry)
[4] D. E. Rumelhart, G. E. Hinton, and R. J. Williams, “Learning representations by back-propagating errors,” in Neurocomputing: Foundations of research, J. A. Anderson and E. Rosenfeld, Eds., MIT Press, 1988, pp. 696–699.
The IEEE rules it applies
- Numbered in citation order, not alphabetically. The first source you cite is [1].
- Initials first: Y. LeCun, not LeCun, Y.
- Up to six authors are listed; seven or more become the first author and et al.
- Titles: articles and chapters in quotation marks, sentence case; journals, proceedings and books in italics. The generator keeps each title as the publisher registered it, so lowercase one that arrives in Title Case, keeping names.
- Journal abbreviations: when the record carries the journal's standard abbreviation, IEEE uses it, for example N Engl J Med for the New England Journal of Medicine. IEEE's own journals often come back with their full names; shorten them with the IEEE abbreviation list if your venue asks.
- DOI at the end as doi: 10.xxxx.
IEEE in-text citations
The citation is the number in square brackets, inside the sentence and before the full stop: "Deep networks learn features from raw data [1]." With a page: [1, p. 440]. Several sources: [1], [3] or a range [2]–[4]. Once a source has a number, use the same number every time you cite it.
Writing in LaTeX: use IEEEtran
If your paper uses the IEEE LaTeX template, do not paste formatted references. Choose BibTeX under To on the DOI to BibTeX or arXiv to BibTeX converter, add the entries to your .bib file, and put this in your document:
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{references}
IEEEtran numbers the list in citation order every time you compile, so adding or moving a citation never breaks the numbering. Check conference papers in the .bib: CrossRef sometimes types them as @article, and IEEEtran then formats them as journal articles.
Frequently asked questions
IEEE names up to six authors and uses the first author and et al. for seven or more. The in-text citation is a number, so the author count never changes it.
Paste its DOI. You get the authors, the paper title in quotation marks, "in" and the proceedings title in italics, the year and pages. Check that the proceedings title is the official one, since CrossRef sometimes stores a shortened name.
No. They are numbered in the order you first cite them, which is why you paste your sources in that order.
Only if it has a DOI. Many standards do (10.1109/IEEESTD...); datasheets and many technical reports do not, so write those by hand.
Yes. Paste the arXiv ID or link and you get the preprint reference with its arXiv number. If the paper has since been published, cite the published version by its DOI instead.
Need the whole paper formatted in LaTeX?
Our LaTeX experts format papers and theses for journals and universities by hand, with no upfront payment. 1,100+ clients in 40+ countries.
See our LaTeX services