How to format your references using the IEEE Transactions on Communications citation style

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

M. Wara, “Is the global carbon market working?,” Nature, vol. 445, no. 7128, pp. 595–596, Feb. 2007.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

P. B. Kelemen and G. Hirth, “A periodic shear-heating mechanism for intermediate-depth earthquakes in the mantle,” Nature, vol. 446, no. 7137, pp. 787–790, Apr. 2007.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

R. Pielke Jr, T. Wigley, and C. Green, “Dangerous assumptions,” Nature, vol. 452, no. 7187, pp. 531–532, Apr. 2008.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

D. A. Allwood et al., “Submicrometer ferromagnetic NOT gate and shift register,” Science, vol. 296, no. 5575, pp. 2003–2006, Jun. 2002.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

W. Moll and A. Moll, Schallschutz im Wohnungsbau. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, 2011.

An edited book

[1]

R. Hohenfellner, Manual Endourology. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2005.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

S. O. Adamson, D. D. Kharlampidi, and A. I. Dementiev, “Application of the Uniformly Charged Sphere Stabilization for Calculating the Lowest 1 S Resonances of H −,” in Advances in Quantum Methods and Applications in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology, M. Hotokka, E. J. Brändas, J. Maruani, and G. Delgado-Barrio, Eds., in Progress in Theoretical Chemistry and Physics. , Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2013, pp. 101–118.

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 Transactions on Communications.

Blog post

[1]

A. Carpineti, “Scientists Fail To Find Mysterious New Type Of Neutrino,” IFLScience. Accessed: Oct. 30, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/scientists-fail-to-find-mysterious-new-type-of-neutrino/

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, “Public Transit: Funding for New Starts and Small Starts Projects, October 2004 through June 2012,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, GAO-13-40, Nov. 2012.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

A. D. Copeland, “A qualitative study of clinical oncology nurses’ perceptions of work-life balance,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ, 2013.

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]

G. Vecsey, “Smile When You Say It: Same Old Jets,” New York Times, p. B25, Jan. 20, 2011.

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]–[4].

About the journal

Full journal title	IEEE Transactions on Communications
ISSN (print)	0090-6778
Scope	Electrical and Electronic Engineering