How to format your references using the IEEE Potentials citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IEEE Potentials. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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]

A. Gangui, “Astronomy. A preposterous universe,” Science, vol. 299, no. 5611, pp. 1333–1334, Feb. 2003.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

J. Dubcovsky and J. Dvorak, “Genome plasticity a key factor in the success of polyploid wheat under domestication,” Science, vol. 316, no. 5833, pp. 1862–1866, Jun. 2007.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. Lev, O. Yehezkel, and U. Polat, “Uncovering foveal crowding?,” Sci. Rep., vol. 4, p. 4067, Feb. 2014.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Ono, H. Terabe, H. Hori, and M. Sasaki, “Insect signalling: components of giant hornet alarm pheromone,” Nature, vol. 424, no. 6949, pp. 637–638, Aug. 2003.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

K. Fitschen, Building Reliable Trading Systems. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013.

An edited book

[1]

T. Gaber, A. E. Hassanien, N. El-Bendary, and N. Dey, Eds., The 1st International Conference on Advanced Intelligent System and Informatics (AISI2015), November 28-30, 2015, Beni Suef, Egypt, vol. 407. in Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 407. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

T. J. Jorgensen, H.-D. Qin, and Y. Y. Shugart, “From Family Study to Population Study: A History of Genetic Mapping for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma (NPC),” in Applied Computational Genomics, Y. Y. Shugart, Ed., in Translational Bioinformatics. , Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2012, pp. 35–60.

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 Potentials.

Blog post

[1]

T. Hale, “Magic Mushrooms Shown To Ease Severe Depression In Groundbreaking Study,” IFLScience.

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, “Overstatement of Contract Target Cost for First Stage of Saturn V Launch Vehicle,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, B-161366, Oct. 1970.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Y.-T. Hsu, “Input and Uptake in High School EFL Students’ Multiple-Draft Writing Process: A Case Study of a Taiwanese High School EFL Classroom,” Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 2017.

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]

K. Feeney, “A Smorgasbord of Empanadas,” New York Times, p. NJ6, Feb. 11, 2007.

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 Potentials
Abbreviation	IEEE Potentials
ISSN (print)	0278-6648
Scope	Strategy and Management Electrical and Electronic Engineering Education