IEEE Website & Online Source Citation Guide

IEEE Website Citation Format

Citing online sources in IEEE style requires two elements that do not appear in journal or book citations: the [Online] descriptor and the [Accessed: ...] date. These markers are mandatory — their purpose is to signal that the source is web-based and to record when you consulted it, since web content can change or disappear.

The IEEE website citation formula [#] Author, "Page title," Website Name. [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Day Mon. Year].

What each part means

Element	Format	Notes
Author	A. B. Author, or Organisation Name,	Use initials for individual authors; full name for organisations. If no author, start with the page title.
Page title	"Title in sentence case,"	Double quotes, sentence case (only first word and proper nouns capitalised).
Website name	Italics.	The website or publication name. Italicised.
[Online].	Literal text in square brackets	Mandatory for all web sources. Signals it is an online reference.
Available:	Full URL	Write out the complete URL. No angle brackets required.
[Accessed: Day Mon. Year].	Day as integer, 3-letter month, 4-digit year	Example: [Accessed: 15 Apr. 2024]. The trailing period goes after the closing bracket.

The golden rule for IEEE web citations: If you got it from a URL rather than a print source, it needs [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Day Mon. Year]. — no exceptions. These two markers are what most students forget.

Standard Web Page

When a web page has a named individual author, use initials followed by the surname, exactly as you would for a journal article author.

Web page with individual author

[1] J. Smith, "Introduction to 5G network architecture," Ericsson Technology Review. [Online]. Available: https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/ericsson-technology-review/articles/5g-architecture. [Accessed: 12 Mar. 2024].

Web page with two authors

[2] A. L. Brown and C. J. Davis, "Quantum computing roadmap 2025," IBM Research Blog. [Online]. Available: https://research.ibm.com/blog/quantum-roadmap-2025. [Accessed: 5 Jan. 2025].

Web page — corporate author

[3] National Institute of Standards and Technology, "Post-quantum cryptography standardization," NIST. [Online]. Available: https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography. [Accessed: 22 Nov. 2024].

When the author is the same as the website/organisation, list the full name as the author and also use it (abbreviated if appropriate) as the website name. Avoid repeating identically unless the source makes this unavoidable.

How to find the author: Look at the top or bottom of the web page, the article byline, or the "About" page. If no individual author is named, use the organisation as the author, or omit the author field and start with the title (see the next section).

Web Page Without an Author

Many institutional pages, product documentation pages, and encyclopedia entries have no named individual author. In IEEE style, when there is no author, start the reference with the page title in quotation marks.

No author — format

No-author format [#] "Page title," Website Name. [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Day Mon. Year].

Example — corporate/institutional page, no individual author

[4] "IEEE Xplore digital library overview," IEEE. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp. [Accessed: 3 Jan. 2025].

Example — software documentation page

[5] "TensorFlow 2.0 migration guide," TensorFlow. [Online]. Available: https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/migrate. [Accessed: 8 Oct. 2024].

Example — Wikipedia

Wikipedia can be cited in IEEE style, though it is rarely appropriate as a primary source in technical papers. When you do cite it, treat it as a no-author web page:

[6] "Convolutional neural network," Wikipedia. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network. [Accessed: 19 Feb. 2025].

Tip: For Wikipedia citations, always use the "Cite this page" tool in the left sidebar to get the stable URL (with a revision ID). This creates a permanent link that will not change as the article is edited.

News Articles and Blog Posts

News articles and blog posts are treated as web pages in IEEE style. There is no distinct "newspaper article" format — the same [Online] / [Accessed] structure applies. The key difference from a journal article is that news and blogs do not use vol./no./pp. fields.

Online news article

[7] C. Metz, "Google's AlphaCode AI writes code that ranks among the top of human programmers," The New York Times. [Online]. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/technology/ai-coding.html. [Accessed: 14 Jun. 2024].

Blog post from a tech company

[8] OpenAI, "Introducing GPT-4o," OpenAI Blog. [Online]. Available: https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o. [Accessed: 20 May 2024].

Individual researcher's blog

[9] A. Ng, "The batch: What happened in AI this week," Andrew Ng's Newsletter. [Online]. Available: https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/. [Accessed: 30 Apr. 2025].

News vs journal article — key differences

Feature	News / blog	Journal article
[Online] marker	Required	Not used (unless online-only)
[Accessed] date	Required	Not used
vol./no./pp.	Not used	Required
doi:	Not applicable	Included when available
Publication name	Italicised website/outlet name	Abbreviated journal name, italics

Government Documents and Standards

Government websites and technical standards are common sources in engineering research. IEEE treats them as online documents with the organisation acting as author.

Government web page

[10] U.S. Department of Energy, "Grid modernization initiative," U.S. DOE. [Online]. Available: https://www.energy.gov/oe/grid-modernization-initiative. [Accessed: 11 Apr. 2024].

IEEE standard (online)

For IEEE standards themselves, the document is the publication — no separate author is listed. The title is italicised and the standard number is included:

[11] IEEE Standard for Ethernet, IEEE Standard 802.3-2022, Nov. 2022. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9844436. [Accessed: 2 Mar. 2025].

ISO / IEC standard

[12] International Organization for Standardization, Information Technology — Coding of Audio-Visual Objects — Part 14: MP4 File Format, ISO/IEC 14496-14:2020, Jan. 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.iso.org/standard/79110.html. [Accessed: 7 Aug. 2024].

RFC (Request for Comments)

[13] T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, and L. Masinter, "Uniform resource identifiers (URI): Generic syntax," Internet Engineering Task Force, Tech. Rep. RFC 3986, Jan. 2005. [Online]. Available: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986. [Accessed: 14 Oct. 2024].

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Online Video (YouTube)

Online videos — including YouTube, Vimeo, and institutional video content — are cited in IEEE style with the descriptor [Online Video] to distinguish them from web pages or journal articles.

Online video format [#] Channel/Author, "Video title," [Online Video], Mon. Day, Year. Available: URL. [Accessed: Day Mon. Year].

YouTube video — channel name as author

[14] 3Blue1Brown, "But what is a neural network?," [Online Video], Oct. 5, 2017. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk. [Accessed: 20 Jan. 2025].

YouTube video — individual creator

[15] A. Karpathy, "Let's build GPT: From scratch, in code, spelled out," [Online Video], Jan. 17, 2023. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY. [Accessed: 3 Mar. 2025].

Institutional or conference video

[16] Google DeepMind, "AlphaFold: A solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology," [Online Video], Nov. 30, 2020. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wJDJ56hhA. [Accessed: 8 Dec. 2024].

Note on date format for videos: For online videos, the upload date is written as Month Day, Year (e.g., "Oct. 5, 2017") — this matches how IEEE handles broadcast-style media. This is distinct from the Year, Mon. order used for journal articles.

Datasets and Repositories

Data citations are increasingly important in engineering and computer science papers. IEEE does not have a single official format for datasets, but the recommended approach treats a dataset like an online document with the [Online] descriptor, adding a data type label.

General dataset format

Dataset / repository format [#] Author/Organisation, "Dataset name," [Dataset], Repository. Year. [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Day Mon. Year].

Zenodo dataset

[17] M. Everingham, L. Van Gool, C. K. I. Williams, J. Winn, and A. Zisserman, "The PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset," [Dataset], Zenodo, 2012. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3745118. [Accessed: 10 Feb. 2025].

GitHub repository

[18] Y. Wu et al., "Detectron2: A PyTorch-based modular object detection library," [Computer Software], GitHub, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2. [Accessed: 5 Apr. 2025].

Hugging Face model or dataset

[19] EleutherAI, "The Pile: An 800GB dataset of diverse text for language modeling," [Dataset], Hugging Face, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://huggingface.co/datasets/EleutherAI/pile. [Accessed: 17 Mar. 2025].

Labels to use: [Dataset] for data files; [Computer Software] for code repositories; [Online Video] for videos; [Online Image] for images. These optional type descriptors help readers understand what kind of resource they are accessing.

Access Date Rules

The [Accessed: Day Mon. Year] field records the date on which you visited and retrieved the online source. This matters because web pages can be updated, moved, or deleted — the access date preserves a snapshot of when the information was current.

When is the access date required?

Always required for web pages, blog posts, news articles, social media, and any source where content may change.
Required for online videos, datasets, and software repositories.
Not required for journal articles or conference papers with a DOI — the DOI is a permanent identifier that does not change.
Optional but recommended for pre-prints and early access papers without a final DOI assignment.

Correct access date format

Component	Format	Example
Day	Integer, no leading zero	5, 12, 28
Month	3-letter abbreviation with period	Jan., Apr., Oct.
Year	4-digit year	2024
Full example	[Accessed: Day Mon. Year].	[Accessed: 15 Apr. 2024].

Month abbreviation reference

Jan. · Feb. · Mar. · Apr. · May · Jun. · Jul. · Aug. · Sep. · Oct. · Nov. · Dec.

Note: "May" has no period because it is already a three-letter word and requires no abbreviation.

Correct

[Accessed: 5 Apr. 2024].

Wrong — full month name

[Accessed: April 5, 2024].

Wrong — numeric date format

[Accessed: 05/04/2024].

Practical tip: Record your access date at the time you visit the source, not when you finish writing. It is easy to forget which date you accessed a specific page if you wait until submission.

Common Mistakes with IEEE URLs

Online source citations in IEEE are the source of the most formatting errors. The table below covers the most frequent mistakes and their corrections.

Mistake	Wrong example	Correct format
Missing [Online] descriptor	Available: https://example.com. [Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024].	[Online]. Available: https://example.com. [Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024].
Missing [Accessed] date	[Online]. Available: https://example.com.	[Online]. Available: https://example.com. [Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024].
Wrong access date format — full month	[Accessed: March 5, 2024].	[Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024].
Wrong access date format — numeric	[Accessed: 05/03/24].	[Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024].
Period inside closing bracket	[Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024.]	[Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024].
No italics on website name	IEEE Spectrum. [Online].	IEEE Spectrum. [Online].
URL in angle brackets	Available: <https://example.com>.	Available: https://example.com.
Line break inserted mid-URL	Available: https://www.example.com/ long-path/page.	Available: https://www.example.com/long-path/page. (keep on one logical line; allow natural word-wrap)
Using "Accessed on" instead of "Accessed"	[Accessed on: 5 Mar. 2024].	[Accessed: 5 Mar. 2024].
Treating a web article as a journal article	J. Smith, "Article title," TechCrunch, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–5, 2024.	J. Smith, "Article title," TechCrunch. [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Day Mon. Year].

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Use Bibloq for IEEE Online Citations

Web citations are the most error-prone references in IEEE style because they require special markers that do not apply to any other source type. Bibloq's IEEE citation generator makes web citations straightforward:

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Automatic [Online] and [Accessed]: Bibloq adds these mandatory markers automatically. The access date defaults to today — change it if needed.
Source type detection: Bibloq identifies YouTube URLs and applies the [Online Video] format automatically.
GitHub and Zenodo support: Dataset and repository citations are formatted with the correct [Dataset] / [Computer Software] labels.
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