How to format your references using the IEEE Communications Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IEEE Communications Letters. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

[1]

J. A. Dowdeswell, “Atmospheric science. The Greenland Ice Sheet and global sea-level rise,” Science, vol. 311, no. 5763, pp. 963–964, Feb. 2006.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

F. Wolf and F. Kirchhoff, “Neuroscience. Imaging astrocyte activity,” Science, vol. 320, no. 5883, pp. 1597–1599, Jun. 2008.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

A. Y. Shcherbina, L. D. Talley, and D. L. Rudnick, “Direct observations of North Pacific ventilation: brine rejection in the Okhotsk Sea,” Science, vol. 302, no. 5652, pp. 1952–1955, Dec. 2003.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

B. Menand et al., “An ancient mechanism controls the development of cells with a rooting function in land plants,” Science, vol. 316, no. 5830, pp. 1477–1480, Jun. 2007.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

[1]

I. Stoop, J. Billiet, A. Koch, and R. Fitzgerald, Improving Survey Response. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

S. E. Haupt, A. Pasini, and C. Marzban, Eds., Artificial Intelligence Methods in the Environmental Sciences. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

D. J. Benson, S. Iyengar, and H. Krause, “Friday,” in Representations of Finite Groups: Local Cohomology and Support, S. Iyengar and H. Krause, Eds., Basel: Springer, 2012, pp. 79–91.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for IEEE Communications Letters.

Blog post

[1]

B. Taub, “The Number Of People Killed In Organized Violence Decreased in 2015,” IFLScience. Accessed: Oct. 30, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/the-number-of-people-killed-in-organized-violence-decreased-in-2015/

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

[1]

Government Accountability Office, “Human Resources Research and Development Results Can Be Better Managed,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, FPCD-77-43, Apr. 1977.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

P. K. Grugan, “The mindfulness practice of clinicians: A systematic review,” Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, 2016.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

[1]

J. Wagner, “Wealth of Experience on the Mets’ Roster Comes With a Painful Cost,” New York Times, p. SP5, May 06, 2017.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1], [2].
This sentence cites four references [1], [2], [3], [4].

About the journal

Full journal title	IEEE Communications Letters
Abbreviation	IEEE Commun. Lett.
ISSN (print)	1089-7798
Scope	Computer Science Applications Electrical and Electronic Engineering Modelling and Simulation