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IEEE Style Guide

Outline of the IEEE citation and reference style

IEEE Resources

Thank You

Thank you to the librarians of Monash University and the American University of Sharja for allowing us to reuse and remix content from their IEEE guides.

Using a DOI in IEEE citations

What is a DOI? A DOI (digital object identifier) is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the internet. 

NOTE: It is regarded as the most important part of the citation because it will accurately direct users to the specific article.

Think of it as a "digital fingerprint" or an article's DNA!

Correct:  

  • doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-114
  • http://doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-114

Incorrect:     

  • doi:http://doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-114
  • Retrieved from http://doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-114

(Above information from The APA blog on DOI. This is APA's official blog and their staff provides excellent examples on APA formatting/citations.)

Quick tutorial video put together by APA.

Electronic books with a DOI

This is the preferred method for referencing an online book, but you can only use this method if you have a DOI.

The citation elements are the same as a print version of the book, with doi:xxxxxx added to the end of the citation.

Citation Elements

Author(s) First name or initials. Surname, or name of organisation, Title of book (in italics) followed by fullstop if no edition statement, or comma if there is an edition statement, ed., Edition (except the first). Place of publication City, Place of publication Country unless the City is considered "well known": Publisher, Year of Publicationdoi: xxxxxxxxx

Note: exclude Country if work orginates in the US, or if the city is considered "well known".

Examples

E-book with DOI

[6] L. Hanzo, F. C. A. Somerville and J. P. Woodard. Voice and audio compression for wireless communications, 2nd ed., Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2007. doi: 10.1002/9780470516034

Where you have both a URL and a DOI, use the DOI. "The basic guideline for citing online sources is to follow the standard citation for the source given previously and add the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) at the end of the citation, or add the DOI in place of page numbers if the source is not paginated."  See p.3 IEEE Citation Guidelines.   

 

Electronic books with a URL and no DOI

Only use this method for referencing an online book if you have a URL but no DOI.

Note: the elements, formatting and order of elements are different to the other formats for books on this page!

Citation Elements

Author(s) First name or initials. Surname. (date of publication year, month day). Title (in italics). (ed. edition except the first) [Type of medium]. Available: site/path/file

Examples

E-book with a URL and no DOI

[7] V. Guruswami. (2004). List decoding of error-correcting codes: winning thesis of the 2002 ACM doctoral dissertation competition. (2nd ed.) [Online]. Available: http://portal.acm.org/3540240519.pdf
 

The style for an ebook with URL does not require publisher details.  Only use this style if your ebook does not have a DOI.

E-book with a URL from a ebook database

[8] A. K. Salkintzis. (2004). Mobile Internet: enabling technologies and services. [Online]. Available: http://www.crcnetbase.com/ISBN/9780203499986.

The above title's full URL is http://www.crcnetbase.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/ISBN/9780203499986.  In most instances it would be reasonable to shorten the URL to www.whatever.com which will usually be the provider of the e-book.  In this case the URL would be http://www.crcnetbase.com.  Alternatively, if it is a reasonable length URL remove the "ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au" portion from the URL.