If you are an engineering students, especially electrical engineering, you may have already produced papers which required the IEEE format style. Certainly, you have seen it if you have conducted any research for a paper.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) developed this system of referencing, though it is really based upon the Chicago style.

Years ago, there was an in-text citation method which generated footnotes, placed either at the bottom of each page or on a single page at the end of a piece of writing. These footnotes gave all of the information necessary for someone to look up that reference and find the quote or the information you had referenced in the author’s writing. When a footnote was needed, the author placed a number right after the content in the text, and then had a footnote with the same number and reference information.

The Chicago and the IEEE citation styles still use this numbered system. Rather than have a parenthetical citation in the text itself, the citation has only a number, encased in brackets (e.g., [1]).

The number in the text corresponds to the numbered reference at the end of the text, the bibliography page.

The additional information that is included with in-text citations is the page numbers where the quote or information is located. Thus, the citation may look like this: [1: 24-26].

Since the end-of-text references must correspond to the numbers in the bibliography, obviously that bibliography is not alphabetized. And, unlike most other styles, each citation begins with the author’s first name, not the last, as in this example:

[1] Susan Marshall, Our Failing Oceans, New York, Vantage Press, 2015. (note: this citation is for a book. Details of other reference types will vary from this).

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