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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IEEE Transactions on Wireless 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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]
A. Gibbons, “Archaeology. Humans may have reached Chile by 18,500 years ago,” Science, vol. 350, no. 6263, p. 898, Nov. 2015.
A journal article with 2 authors
[1]
R. M. Ransohoff and B. Stevens, “Neuroscience. How many cell types does it take to wire a brain?,” Science, vol. 333, no. 6048, pp. 1391–1392, Sep. 2011.
A journal article with 3 authors
[1]
M. Staal, F. J. R. Meysman, and L. J. Stal, “Temperature excludes N2-fixing heterocystous cyanobacteria in the tropical oceans,” Nature, vol. 425, no. 6957, pp. 504–507, Oct. 2003.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
[1]
J. Rius et al., “NF-kappaB links innate immunity to the hypoxic response through transcriptional regulation of HIF-1alpha,” Nature, vol. 453, no. 7196, pp. 807–811, Jun. 2008.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
[1]
T. Woolley, Low Impact Building. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
An edited book
[1]
H. L. Kaufman and J. M. Mehnert, Eds., Melanoma, 1st ed. 2016., vol. 167. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016.
A chapter in an edited book
[1]
F. Danion, “Do We Need Internal Models for Movement Control?,” in Nonlinear Dynamics in Human Behavior, R. Huys and V. K. Jirsa, Eds. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2011, pp. 115–134.

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 Wireless Communications.

Blog post
[1]
T. Hale, “No, Friday’s ‘Black Moon’ Doesn’t Mean The End Of The World,” IFLScience, Sep. 28, 2016. https://www.iflscience.com/space/no-fridays-black-moon-doesnt-mean-the-end-of-the-world/ (accessed Oct. 30, 2018).

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, “Intellectual Property: Enhancements to Coordinating U.S. Enforcement Efforts,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, GAO-10-219T, Dec. 2009.

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. Felder Derkacs, “The role of desmin in the signaling response to mechanical stretch of skeletal muscle,” Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 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. Williams, “‘The Chosen’ at 50,” New York Times, p. BR4, Nov. 18, 2016.

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 titleIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
AbbreviationIEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun.
ISSN (print)1536-1276
ScopeComputer Science Applications
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Applied Mathematics

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