IEEE style
How to cite a book in IEEE style
Books look simple until you hit an edition number, a translator, or a publisher that has been bought three times — and the title page rarely matches the cover.
THE FORMAT
A book in IEEE, at a glance
[#] A. B. Author, Title of the Book, #th ed. City, State, Country: Publisher, Year.
[4] L. Ferreira and D. N. Okafor, Principles of Distributed Power Conversion, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley, 2020.
The dual-active-bridge derivation follows the standard treatment [4, pp. 210–214].
In prose: Ferreira and Okafor [4] reach the same result from a small-signal model rather than a switching-cycle average.
[5] R. Alvarado and M. Sundqvist, Eds., Handbook of Grid-Scale Storage. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022.
In text: A recent handbook surveys the same trade-off [5].
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the references builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What IEEE needs from a book
Elements to collect
- Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author)
- Year of publication of the edition you actually read
- Full title, including any subtitle after the colon
- Edition number, when it is not the first
- Publisher name
- DOI or URL for an ebook that has one
Rules specific to this entry
- A whole book carries no page range in the entry. Pages, chapters, and figures go in the in-text bracket instead: [4, pp. 210–214], [4, ch. 7]. This is the opposite of the chapter pattern, where the range belongs in the entry.
- Place of publication is city, state or province abbreviation, and country — “Hoboken, NJ, USA”, “Cambridge, U.K.”, “Cham, Switzerland”. IEEE wants all three parts, and a bare city is incomplete.
- The edition follows the italicized title after a comma and is not itself italicized, then a period closes the title group before the place: “…<em>Power Conversion</em>, 2nd ed. Hoboken…”. First editions are not labeled.
- Book titles take headline capitalization; article and chapter titles take sentence case. Getting this backward is the fastest way to make an IEEE list look unedited.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element IEEE needs for a book: Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author); Year of publication of the edition you actually read; Full title, including any subtitle after the colon; Edition number, when it is not the first.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the IEEE order: [#] A. B. Author, Title of the Book, #th ed. City, State, Country: Publisher, Year.
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as The dual-active-bridge derivation follows the standard treatment [4, pp. 210–214]. — or work the same reference into your sentence as Ferreira and Okafor [4] reach the same result from a small-signal model rather than a switching-cycle average..
Check it against the exceptions
A whole book carries no page range in the entry. Pages, chapters, and figures go in the in-text bracket instead: [4, pp. 210–214], [4, ch. 7]. This is the opposite of the chapter pattern, where the range belongs in the entry.
IEEE RULES
The conventions behind every IEEE entry
IEEE Reference Guide is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the references is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the references is sorted, and where IEEE entries most often go wrong — are collected on the IEEE style guide.
The same book in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about IEEE and books
What if the book has no author?
Start the entry with the title and keep the number you already assigned it. A numeric references never re-sorts for a missing author, so the entry stays exactly where it is.
What do I need before I can cite a book?
Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author), Year of publication of the edition you actually read, Full title, including any subtitle after the colon, and the rest of the elements listed above. Books look simple until you hit an edition number, a translator, or a publisher that has been bought three times — and the title page rarely matches the cover.
Is there anything unusual about a book in IEEE?
A whole book carries no page range in the entry. Pages, chapters, and figures go in the in-text bracket instead: [4, pp. 210–214], [4, ch. 7]. This is the opposite of the chapter pattern, where the range belongs in the entry.
What else catches people out here?
Place of publication is city, state or province abbreviation, and country — “Hoboken, NJ, USA”, “Cambridge, U.K.”, “Cham, Switzerland”. IEEE wants all three parts, and a bare city is incomplete.
Can I reformat this book in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole references at once.
