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

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

D. Carlson, “A lesson in sharing,” Nature, vol. 469, no. 7330, p. 293, Jan. 2011.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

B. Y. Chow and E. S. Boyden, “Physiology. Synthetic physiology,” Science, vol. 332, no. 6037, pp. 1508–1509, Jun. 2011.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

N. Shembade, A. Ma, and E. W. Harhaj, “Inhibition of NF-kappaB signaling by A20 through disruption of ubiquitin enzyme complexes,” Science, vol. 327, no. 5969, pp. 1135–1139, Feb. 2010.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

P. Bierhorst et al., “Experimentally generated randomness certified by the impossibility of superluminal signals,” Nature, vol. 556, no. 7700, pp. 223–226, Apr. 2018.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

T. Bonald and M. Feuillet, Network Performance Analysis. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2011.

An edited book

[1]

J. L. Ayuso Muñoz, J. L. Yagüe Blanco, and S. F. Capuz-Rizo, Eds., Project Management and Engineering Research, 2014: Selected Papers from the 18th International AEIPRO Congress held in Alcañiz, Spain, in 2014. in Lecture Notes in Management and Industrial Engineering. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M. Di Risio, P. J. Ballantyne, and S. Read, “Living Optimally with HIV: Youth Experience in a Metropolitan Canadian City,” in Children and Young People Living with HIV/AIDS: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, P. Liamputtong, Ed., in Cross-Cultural Research in Health, Illness and Well-Being. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016, pp. 89–105.

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 Professional Communication.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, “Amazon Carbon Sink Is In Decline As Trees Die Off Faster,” IFLScience, Mar. 20, 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, “Customs Automation: Effectiveness of Entry Summary Selectivity System Is Unknown,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, IMTEC-92-20, Mar. 1992.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J. R. Brown, “Trajectories of parents’ experiences in discovering, reporting, and living with the aftermath of middle school bullying,” Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 2010.

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. McKINLEY, B. Mueller, and R. Rojas, “Witness Says Clash Over Witchcraft Preceded a Teenager’s Fatal Beating,” New York Times, p. A17, Oct. 17, 2015.

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 Professional Communication
Abbreviation	IEEE Trans. Prof. Commun.
ISSN (print)	0361-1434
Scope	Industrial relations Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Research and Writing Guides