Conference papers are among the most cited source types in IEEE-style work, especially in engineering and computer science. The citation format differs from journal articles in several key ways — the paper appears in a proceedings volume, not a journal, and the conference location and date play a role in the reference. This guide covers every case with complete, ready-to-use examples.
IEEE Conference Paper Citation: Basic Structure
[#] A. A. Author and B. B. Author, "Title of paper," in Proc. Full Conference Name (ABBREVIATION), City, Country, Year, pp. XXX–XXX, doi: 10.XXXX/XXXXX.Field-by-Field Breakdown
| Field | Rule | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Reference number | Sequential bracket | [1] |
| Authors | Initials then last name; «and» before last | A. K. Singh and P. Verma |
| Paper title | Quoted; sentence case | «Federated learning for edge devices» |
| «in» | Lowercase, precedes proceedings title | in |
| Proceedings title | Italicized; use «Proc.» prefix; include acronym | Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Commun. (ICC) |
| City, Country | Conference location | Seoul, South Korea |
| Year | Year of the conference | 2024 |
| Pages | pp. XXX–XXX | pp. 1–6 |
| DOI | doi: 10.XXXX/… | doi: 10.1109/ICC.2024.0123456 |
Complete Examples
Example 1 — IEEE conference with DOI (standard case)
[1] A. K. Singh and P. Verma, "Federated learning for heterogeneous edge devices in 5G networks," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Commun. (ICC), Seoul, South Korea, 2024, pp. 1–6, doi: 10.1109/ICC.2024.0123456.Example 2 — Paper at CVPR (computer vision)
[2] L. Zhang, Y. Wang, and H. Li, "Real-time semantic segmentation using lightweight transformer architectures," in Proc. IEEE/CVF Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. (CVPR), New Orleans, LA, USA, 2022, pp. 4512–4521, doi: 10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.00448.Example 3 — ICASSP (signal processing)
[3] M. Chen and R. Liu, "Attention-based speech enhancement in noisy environments," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process. (ICASSP), Singapore, 2022, pp. 7352–7356, doi: 10.1109/ICASSP43922.2022.9747548.Example 4 — Non-IEEE conference (ACM, USENIX, etc.)
[4] J. Brown and K. White, "Memory-efficient transformer inference on mobile hardware," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. Syst. (MLSys), Santa Clara, CA, USA, 2023, pp. 88–101.Example 5 — Virtual/online conference
[5] T. Nakamura et al., "Quantum circuit optimization with reinforcement learning," in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Inf. Theory (ISIT), Virtual Conference, 2021, pp. 2785–2790, doi: 10.1109/ISIT45174.2021.9518088.Example 6 — Conference paper with no page numbers
Some conference papers — particularly those published only digitally — do not have printed page numbers. Include the DOI and omit the page field:
[6] C. Park, "Self-supervised pretraining for low-resource NLP tasks," in Proc. Annu. Conf. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. (ACL), Toronto, ON, Canada, 2023, doi: 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-main.456.Common IEEE Conference Abbreviations
| Conference name | IEEE abbreviation in references |
|---|---|
| International Conference on Communications | Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Commun. (ICC) |
| Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition | Proc. IEEE/CVF Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. (CVPR) |
| International Symposium on Information Theory | Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Inf. Theory (ISIT) |
| International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing | Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process. (ICASSP) |
| International Conference on Robotics and Automation | Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. (ICRA) |
| Global Communications Conference | Proc. IEEE Global Commun. Conf. (GLOBECOM) |
Conference Paper vs. Journal Article: Key Differences
| Feature | Conference paper | Journal article |
|---|---|---|
| Proceedings label | «in Proc. …» precedes title | Not used |
| Source title | Italicized proceedings name | Abbreviated journal name |
| Location | City, Country of conference | Not included |
| Volume/issue | Not used (pages only) | vol. X, no. Y required |
| Month | Usually omitted (year only) | Required (abbreviated) |
Common Mistakes
- Omitting «in» before the proceedings title — always write «in Proc. …«
- Using «Proceedings of the…» instead of «Proc.» — abbreviate with «Proc.»
- Not italicizing the proceedings title — the proceedings name is italicized, not the paper title
- Confusing conference year with proceedings publication year — use the conference year
- Skipping the location for virtual conferences — write «Virtual Conference» as the location
For all IEEE source types — books, theses, websites, and standards — see the IEEE Format Center.