IEEE Referencing – How to Cite a Journal Article

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers publishes many journals of its own. More important from a proofreading point of view, though, is that IEEE referencing has specific rules for how to cite a journal article. In this post, we look at exactly how this works.

In-Text Citations

IEEE referencing cites sources using bracketed numbers in your writing. Each citation indicates a text in a reference list at the end of your document, with sources numbered in the order they are first cited. To cite a journal article, then, we would give a number at the end of the relevant sentence:

The costs of underestimating the scope of a project can be massive [1].

Here, for instance, the number in the brackets shows we’re citing the first source in the reference list.

The main variations on the citation format shown above are:

• When the author of a source is named in your text, give the citation immediately afterwards.
• If quoting a source, make sure to include page numbers in the citation.
• To cite the same article again, use the same number as on the first citation.

Reference List: Print Journal Article

In the reference list of your document, the format for a print article is:

[#] Author Initial(s) and Surname, ‘Article title’, Journal Title, volume number, issue number, page range, month and year of publication.

In practice then, we would list a print journal article as follows:

[1] T. Schafer, ‘Estimating Project Scope to Maximize Efficiency’, Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 9, No. 2., pp. 101–122, April-June 2003.

Make sure to include a hanging indent for each line after the first in an entry.

Reference List: Online Journal Article

These days, of course, paper is a bit old-fashioned. Some journals are therefore only available online. In this case, the format to use when referencing a journal article is a little different:

[#] Author Initial(s) and Surname, ‘Article title’, Journal Title, volume number, issue number, page range, month and year of publication. DOI.

The reference list entry for an online journal article would therefore look like this:

[2] W. Xi, Y. Yesilevskiy and C. D. Remy, ‘Selecting gaits for economical locomotion of legged robots’, The International Journal of Robotics Research, vol. 35, no. 9, pp. 1140–1154, Nov. 2015. doi: 10.3994/ijep.v10i2.12672.

If there is no DOI available, however, you should provide a URL and date of access:

[3] D. Cage, ‘Including Complexity in the Design Process’, Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics, Vol. 1, No. 3, June 2011. Accessed: 5 April 2019. [Online]. Available: http://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jep/article/view/241611.

As above, don’t forget to use a hanging indent for each line after the first.