IEEE Journal Article Citation Generator: Full Guide

IEEE Journal Article Format

The IEEE journal article reference has a fixed sequence of elements. Every field must appear in the correct position with the correct punctuation. The full format is:

[#] Author initials & names, "Article title — sentence case," Abbrev. Journal Name, vol. X, no. Y, pp. ZZ–ZZ, Mon. Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxxxx.

Field-by-field breakdown

Field	Format rule	Example
Reference number	Square brackets, left margin	[1]
Author(s)	Initials then surname; "and" before last; et al. for 7+	J. K. Liu and T. H. Chen,
Article title	Double quotes, sentence case	"Deep learning for object detection,"
Journal name	Italics, standard abbreviation	IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst.,
Volume	vol. (lowercase)	vol. 23,
Issue/number	no. (lowercase)	no. 8,
Pages	pp. with en-dash	pp. 11245–11258,
Month	3-letter abbreviation	Aug.
Year	4-digit year	2022,
DOI	doi: (lowercase) + identifier	doi: 10.1109/TITS.2021.3105478.

Month abbreviations: Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., May (no period), Jun., Jul., Aug., Sep., Oct., Nov., Dec. Note that "May" has no abbreviation period because the full spelling is already short.

Standard Journal Article Examples

Below are complete worked examples for the most common journal article scenarios.

Journal article with DOI (most common)

[1] J. K. Liu and T. H. Chen, "Deep learning approaches for real-time object detection in autonomous vehicles," IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst., vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 11245–11258, Aug. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TITS.2021.3105478.

Journal article without DOI

If the article has no DOI (older journals, some open-access publications), omit the doi element entirely:

[2] M. R. Patel, "Energy-efficient MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks," IEEE Sens. J., vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 1502–1511, Feb. 2019.

Three authors

[3] A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and G. E. Hinton, "ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks," Commun. ACM, vol. 60, no. 6, pp. 84–90, Jun. 2017, doi: 10.1145/3065386.

Seven or more authors (et al.)

[4] Y. Wang et al., "Transformer-based models for natural language processing: A comprehensive survey," IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. Learn. Syst., vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 1023–1048, Feb. 2024, doi: 10.1109/TNNLS.2022.3230901.

Article with no issue number

Some journals publish by volume only, with no issue number. In that case, omit the "no." field:

[5] C. Szegedy, W. Liu, and Y. Jia, "Going deeper with convolutions," Int. J. Comput. Vis., vol. 128, pp. 1215–1233, May 2020, doi: 10.1007/s11263-019-01208-1.

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Conference Paper vs Journal Article

One of the most common sources of confusion in IEEE referencing is the difference between a journal article and a conference paper. They look similar but have distinct format rules.

Journal Article

[1] A. B. Author and C. D. Writer, "Article title," IEEE Trans. Abbrev., vol. X, no. Y, pp. ZZ–ZZ, Mon. Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxx.

Conference Paper

[2] A. B. Author and C. D. Writer, "Paper title," in Proc. Conf. Name (ABBREV), City, Country, Year, pp. ZZ–ZZ.

Feature	Journal Article	Conference Paper
Opening keyword	None (starts with author)	"in Proc." before conference name
Publication title	Abbreviated journal name, italics	Full conference name + abbreviation, italics
Volume/issue	vol. X, no. Y	Not used
Location	Not included	City, Country required
Year placement	After month, before doi	After location, before pages
Pages	pp. ZZ–ZZ before month	pp. ZZ–ZZ at end (before doi)

Side-by-side real examples

Journal article

[1] Y. LeCun, L. Bottou, Y. Bengio, and P. Haffner, "Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition," Proc. IEEE, vol. 86, no. 11, pp. 2278–2324, Nov. 1998, doi: 10.1109/5.726791.

Conference paper (same authors, different publication)

[2] Y. LeCun, L. Bottou, Y. Bengio, and P. Haffner, "Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 1998, pp. 905–912.

IEEE Magazine Articles

IEEE publishes several magazines — including IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Computer, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and others — that differ from peer-reviewed transactions journals. Magazine articles still follow the journal format, but there are some common variations.

Standard IEEE magazine article

[6] R. Courtland, "The road to self-driving cars is longer than you think," IEEE Spectrum, vol. 55, no. 8, pp. 36–43, Aug. 2018.

Magazine article without volume/issue

Some IEEE magazine articles — especially online-only features — may not carry traditional volume and issue numbers. In that case, include what is available and add the access information:

[7] E. Strickland, "How Boston Dynamics is remaking its robot for the age of AI," IEEE Spectrum. [Online]. Available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/boston-dynamics-spot-ai. [Accessed: 10 Feb. 2025].

Tip: When in doubt about whether a publication is a "journal" or "magazine," use the same format and include whatever bibliographic information is available (volume, issue, pages). The key identifiers are the same.

Early Access Articles

IEEE Xplore publishes many articles as Early Access — available online before a volume/issue assignment. These articles have a DOI but no vol., no., or page numbers yet. The IEEE format for early access is:

[#] A. B. Author and C. D. Writer, "Article title," Abbrev. Journal Name, early access, Mon. Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxxxx.

Early access example

[8] X. Zhang, Y. Li, and H. Wang, "Federated learning with differential privacy for edge intelligence," IEEE Internet Things J., early access, Mar. 2025, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2025.3456789.

Key rules for early access

Omit vol., no., and pp. — these are not yet assigned.
Use the phrase "early access," (with a comma) in place of the volume/issue/page block.
Include the month and year of online publication.
Always include the DOI — this is the permanent identifier for an early access article.

Once the article is assigned to a volume and issue, update the reference with the full volume, issue, and page information if possible.

Non-IEEE Journals

The IEEE reference format is not limited to IEEE publications. The same structure applies to any peer-reviewed journal in engineering, computer science, physics, mathematics, or related fields. The key difference is the journal name abbreviation.

Abbreviating journal names

IEEE style requires abbreviated journal names. For non-IEEE journals, use the standard abbreviations from:

ISO 4 — the International Standard for the abbreviation of titles of periodicals
NLM (National Library of Medicine) abbreviations for biomedical journals
The journal's own website, which often lists its ISO 4 abbreviation

Examples — non-IEEE journals

[9] I. Goodfellow, J. Pouget-Abadie, and M. Mirza, "Generative adversarial networks," Commun. ACM, vol. 63, no. 11, pp. 139–144, Nov. 2020, doi: 10.1145/3422622.

[10] T. Brown et al., "Language models are few-shot learners," Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst., vol. 33, pp. 1877–1901, Dec. 2020.

[11] G. Hinton, "Deep learning — A technology with the potential to transform health care," JAMA, vol. 320, no. 11, pp. 1101–1102, Sep. 2018, doi: 10.1001/jama.2018.11100.

When you cannot find the official abbreviation: Use a reasonable shortening that follows ISO 4 principles — abbreviate significant words (e.g., "International" → "Int.", "Journal" → "J.", "Transactions" → "Trans."), and omit articles and prepositions. Bibloq applies standard abbreviations automatically when you cite by DOI.

Author Name Rules

Correct author name formatting is one of the clearest signals of IEEE style literacy. Here are all the rules in one place.

One author

A. B. Author,

Two authors

A. B. Author and C. D. Writer,

Three to six authors

A. B. Author, C. D. Writer, E. F. Scholar, and G. H. Researcher,

Seven or more authors

A. B. Author et al.,

List only the first author followed by "et al." — not in italics, no period after "et" (but period after "al.").

Hyphenated given names

Y.-H. Wang and X.-Q. Zhang,

For hyphenated given names, use the initial of each part with a hyphen between them: "Yi-Hao Wang" becomes "Y.-H. Wang".

Chinese, Korean, and Japanese names

Follow the same initial + surname format. The surname is the family name as used in the publication. For example: "Wei Zhang" → "W. Zhang"; "Hyun-Soo Park" → "H.-S. Park".

Corporate/institutional author

World Health Organization,

When an article is authored by an organisation, write the full organisation name — do not abbreviate to initials. The organisation replaces the author field entirely.

Wrong

Liu, Jiankang and Chen, Thomas H.,

Correct

J. Liu and T. H. Chen,

Quick-Reference Table

Use this table to find the format for your source type at a glance.

Source type	In-text	Reference format
Journal article (with DOI)	[1]	A. Author, "Title," J. Abbrev., vol. X, no. Y, pp. ZZ–ZZ, Mon. Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxx.
Journal article (no DOI)	[2]	A. Author, "Title," J. Abbrev., vol. X, no. Y, pp. ZZ–ZZ, Mon. Year.
Early access article	[3]	A. Author, "Title," J. Abbrev., early access, Mon. Year, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxx.
Conference paper	[4]	A. Author, "Title," in Proc. Conf. Name (ABBREV), City, Country, Year, pp. ZZ–ZZ.
IEEE magazine article	[5]	A. Author, "Title," IEEE Magazine Name, vol. X, no. Y, pp. ZZ–ZZ, Mon. Year.
IEEE magazine (online only)	[6]	A. Author, "Title," IEEE Magazine Name. [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Day Mon. Year].
7+ authors	[7]	A. Author et al., "Title," J. Abbrev., vol. X, no. Y, pp. ZZ–ZZ, Mon. Year, doi: ...

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Use Bibloq for IEEE Journal Citations

Journal article citations are the most detail-sensitive references in IEEE style. A single wrong field — abbreviated vs full journal name, month in the wrong position, missing doi: prefix — can get your submission flagged by an editor or lose marks in an academic submission.

Bibloq's IEEE citation generator handles journal articles with precision:

DOI lookup: Paste a DOI and Bibloq retrieves the full metadata from Crossref — author names, journal name, volume, issue, pages, and month.
Automatic journal abbreviation: Bibloq applies the correct ISO 4 abbreviation for thousands of journals, including all IEEE Transactions and Letters series.
Author formatting: Initials are applied automatically, and "et al." is triggered for seven or more authors.
Early access detection: When vol./issue are not yet assigned, Bibloq uses the early access format automatically.
One-click copy: Copy the formatted reference directly to your clipboard, ready to paste into your reference list.

For researchers and students who deal with large reference lists, Bibloq also supports batch citation — cite multiple sources at once and export a complete reference list in order.

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