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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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. N. Cleland, “PHYSICS. Pumping up the quantum,” Science, vol. 350, no. 6258, p. 280, Oct. 2015.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

B. S. Khakh and R. A. North, “P2X receptors as cell-surface ATP sensors in health and disease,” Nature, vol. 442, no. 7102, pp. 527–532, Aug. 2006.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

C. Acquisti, J. Kleffe, and S. Collins, “Oxygen content of transmembrane proteins over macroevolutionary time scales,” Nature, vol. 445, no. 7123, pp. 47–52, Jan. 2007.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. A. Baur, Y. Zou, J. W. Shay, and W. E. Wright, “Telomere position effect in human cells,” Science, vol. 292, no. 5524, pp. 2075–2077, Jun. 2001.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A. Bachmutsky, System Design for Telecommunication Gateways. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

M. Sagiv, Ed., Programming Languages and Systems: 14th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2005, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2005, Edinburgh, UK, April 4-8, 2005. Proceedings, vol. 3444. in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3444. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2005.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Basso-Blandin and F. Delaplace, “GUBS a Language for Synthetic Biology: Specification and Compilation,” in Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation: 13th International Conference, UCNC 2014, London, ON, Canada, July 14-18, 2014, Proceedings, O. H. Ibarra, L. Kari, and S. Kopecki, Eds., in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. , Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014, pp. 40–53.

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]

S. Luntz, “Beating Artificial Heart Tissue Announced,” IFLScience. Accessed: Oct. 30, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/beating-artificial-heart-tissue-announced/

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, “School Bus Safety: Crash Data Trends and Federal and State Requirements,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, GAO-17-209, Jan. 2017.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

S. Skiold-Hanlin, “Functional and Ecological Aspects of the Mucus Trails of the Freshwater Gastropod Elimia potosiensis,” Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL, 2015.

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. L. Philpott, “Finding What I Need at the Mall,” New York Times, p. SR10, Mar. 04, 2017.

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 Transactions on Communications
ISSN (print)	0090-6778
Scope	Electrical and Electronic Engineering