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]

P. Graf, “Hive beetle causes a buzz in Europe,” Nature, vol. 423, no. 6942, p. 793, Jun. 2003.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

R. D. McMichael and M. D. Stiles, “Physics. A new spin on the Doppler effect,” Science, vol. 322, no. 5900, pp. 386–387, Oct. 2008.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Y. E. Goldman, C. Franzini-Armstrong, and C. M. Armstrong, “Andrew Fielding Huxley (1917-2012),” Nature, vol. 486, no. 7404, p. 474, Jun. 2012.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

K. S. Novoselov, A. K. Geim, S. V. Dubonos, E. W. Hill, and I. V. Grigorieva, “Subatomic movements of a domain wall in the Peierls potential,” Nature, vol. 426, no. 6968, pp. 812–816, Dec. 2003.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M. Peter and C. Scheer, Holzbau-Taschenbuch. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, 2015.

An edited book

[1]

T. J. Petersen, S. E. Sprich, and S. Wilhelm, Eds., The Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, 1st ed. 2016. in Current Clinical Psychiatry. New York, NY: Springer, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

G. Csató, B. Dacorogna, and O. Kneuss, “An Identity Involving Exterior Derivatives and Gaffney Inequality,” in The Pullback Equation for Differential Forms, B. Dacorogna and O. Kneuss, Eds., Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 2012, pp. 101–120.

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]

E. Andrew, “Schrödinger’s Cat Gets A Reality Check,” IFLScience. Accessed: Oct. 30, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/schr-dinger-s-cat-gets-reality-check/

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, “Transportation Services: Better Dissemination and Oversight of DOT’s Guidance Could Lead to Improved Access for Limited English-Proficient Populations (Korean Version),” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, GAO-06-188, Nov. 2005.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Y. Oh, “Prediction of Steady State Response in Dynamic Mode Atomic Force Microscopy and Its Applications in Nano-metrology,” Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 2006.

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]

M. Billard, “At J. Crew’s Bridal Store, a Parisian Air,” New York Times, p. E6, May 27, 2010.

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