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BME 3300: Biomedical Engineering Design: Citations

Citation Help & Management

Here are links to guides on citations overall as well as tools available to help manage your citations:

What is IEEE Citation Style

The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a professional organization supporting many branches of engineering, including biomedical engineering. In addition to publishing journals, magazines, and conference proceedings, IEEE also makes many standards for a wide variety of industries.

IEEE citation style includes in-text citations with numbered in square brackets, which refer to the full citation listed in the reference list at the end of the paper. The reference list is organized numerically, not alphabetically. For examples, see the IEEE Editorial Style Manual here: IEEE Reference Guide 01-29-2021 https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/IEEE-Reference-Guide-Online-v.04-20-2021.pdf

IEEE Guides & Examples

Here are some guides on using IEEE that include example citations:

IEEE Citation Style: The Basics

IEEE is a numbered referencing style where the author's name, pages used, and date of publication are NOT used in the in-text citation. Instead, a number [X] is inserted at the point in your writing where you cite another author's work.

At the end of your work, the full reference [X] of the work is provided.

Citations and their corresponding references are provided in the order they appear throughout your writing.

In-text Citations  

  • Place bracketed numbered citations within the line of text, before any punctuation, with a space before the first bracket.

Example:

"This theory was first put forward in 1987 [1]."

"Scholtz [2] has argued that..."

  • Number the sources as you cite them in the paper. Once a source is cited in the text and given a number, continue to use that number every time that source is used again throughout the paper.
  • If multiple citations are required for a particular section of text, list each reference number separately, in its own set of brackets, using a comma or dash between numbers, as such: [1], [3], [5] or [1] - [5].

Example:

“Several recent studies [3], [15], [22]-[25] have suggested that. . . .”

Reference List  

The reference list appears at the end of your paper and provides the full citations for all the references you have used.  The reference list should be arranged in the order of appearance of the in-text citations, not in an alphabetical order, beginning with [1], and continuing in consecutive numerical order, from the lowest number to the highest.

Reference Components

Each individual reference in the reference list should generally contain following components in the following order:

  • Citation number: Enclosed in brackets [x], aligned with the left margin. Indent the text 2-3 spaces after the bracket (Ex: [1]   R. E. Ziemer...)
  • Author(s) name(s): First initials then last name. Use and "and" to separate 2 authors. For
  • Titles of articles, chapters, conference papers. etc:  Lower case, enclose the title in double quotation marks with a comma before the ending quotation mark. (Ex: "Minimum energy control of fractional positive electrical circuits,"
  • Titles of books, journals and conference proceedings: Capitalized and in italics. (Ex: Journal of Global Management)
  • Publication information: For books list City, State (if U.S.) or Country if the city is not well known: Publisher Name, Date. (Ex: Boston, MA: Artech House, 2007.) For journals list volume number(issue number),
  • Page numbers (if applicable): p. for a single page or pp. for multiple pages. (Ex: p. 27 OR pp.32-45.)
  • Online sources:  After the date/pages - [Online]. Available: URL or doi or database name. (Ex: [Online]. Available: http://www.ieee.org. [Accessed Sept. 5, 2017].)