How to format your references using the IEEE Spectrum citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IEEE Spectrum. 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]

S. E. Staveteig, “Scientists and societies. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria,” Nature, vol. 433, no. 7023, p. 338, Jan. 2005.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

N. Furukawa and J. Mima, “Multiple and distinct strategies of yeast SNAREs to confer the specificity of membrane fusion,” Sci. Rep., vol. 4, p. 4277, Mar. 2014.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

L. Gitlin, S. Karelsky, and R. Andino, “Short interfering RNA confers intracellular antiviral immunity in human cells,” Nature, vol. 418, no. 6896, pp. 430–434, Jul. 2002.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

G. Tamás, A. Lorincz, A. Simon, and J. Szabadics, “Identified sources and targets of slow inhibition in the neocortex,” Science, vol. 299, no. 5614, pp. 1902–1905, Mar. 2003.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

S. Mohanty and R. Ghosh, Planning a Scientific Career in Industry. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.

An edited book

[1]

J. A. Radosevich, Ed., Head & Neck Cancer: Current Perspectives, Advances, and Challenges. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

P. Lory and M. Liedel, “Accelerating the Secure Distributed Computation of the Mean by a Chebyshev Expansion,” in Information Security and Privacy: 17th Australasian Conference, ACISP 2012, Wollongong, NSW, Australia, July 9-11, 2012. Proceedings, W. Susilo, Y. Mu, and J. Seberry, Eds., in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. , Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2012, pp. 57–70.

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 Spectrum.

Blog post

[1]

A. Carpineti, “Molecular Knot Is The Tightest Tied Structure Yet,” 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, “Career Education: Status and Needed Improvements,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, MWD-76-81, Jan. 1976.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R. A. Slaughter, “Tradition and Progress: California Fire Technology Directors Beliefs and Values,” Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, 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]

S. Almosawa and N. Youssef, “Shattered Yemen Falls Victim to Another Deadly Enemy: Cholera,” New York Times, p. A4, Jul. 07, 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 Spectrum
Abbreviation	IEEE Spectr.
ISSN (print)	0018-9235
Scope	Electrical and Electronic Engineering