IEEE style
How to cite a thesis or dissertation in IEEE style
A thesis needs its degree level and awarding institution, and the format changes depending on whether you read it in a repository or as an unpublished manuscript.
THE FORMAT
A thesis or dissertation in IEEE, at a glance
[#] A. B. Author, “Title of the thesis,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. …, Univ. …, City, State, Country, Year.
[4] P. Osei-Bonsu, “Sparse observers for wide-area power system monitoring,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Comput. Eng., Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA, 2021.
A placement heuristic for the same observer problem already exists [4].
In prose: Osei-Bonsu [4] shows that observability can be preserved with roughly a third of the sensors.
[5] I. Márquez, “A low-power front end for capacitive rain sensing,” M.S. thesis, Dept. Microelectron., Delft Univ. of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, 2023. Accessed: Apr. 2, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid-8f21c4
In text: A comparable front end draws under 40 µW [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 thesis or dissertation
Elements to collect
- Author
- Year the degree was awarded
- Title of the thesis
- Degree level — doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis
- Name of the awarding institution
- Repository or database name, plus URL, when it is published online
Rules specific to this entry
- The degree level occupies the slot where a publisher would go: “Ph.D. dissertation” or “M.S. thesis”, written out in that abbreviated form. It is not bracketed the way Vancouver brackets [dissertation].
- IEEE names and abbreviates the department, which no other major style does — “Dept. Elect. Comput. Eng.” If the thesis does not state a department, give the school or faculty instead of guessing.
- A thesis title is quoted and sentence-cased like an article, not italicized like a book, even though the work is book-length. The reasoning is that a thesis is a manuscript rather than a published volume.
- If you read it in a repository, close the entry with the online pattern: “Accessed: … [Online]. Available: …”. When the repository issues a DOI, use it in place of the URL.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element IEEE needs for a thesis or dissertation: Author; Year the degree was awarded; Title of the thesis; Degree level — doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the IEEE order: [#] A. B. Author, “Title of the thesis,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. …, Univ. …, City, State, Country, Year.
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as A placement heuristic for the same observer problem already exists [4]. — or work the same reference into your sentence as Osei-Bonsu [4] shows that observability can be preserved with roughly a third of the sensors..
Check it against the exceptions
The degree level occupies the slot where a publisher would go: “Ph.D. dissertation” or “M.S. thesis”, written out in that abbreviated form. It is not bracketed the way Vancouver brackets [dissertation].
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 thesis or dissertation in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about IEEE and theses and dissertations
What if the thesis or dissertation 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 thesis or dissertation?
Author, Year the degree was awarded, Title of the thesis, and the rest of the elements listed above. A thesis needs its degree level and awarding institution, and the format changes depending on whether you read it in a repository or as an unpublished manuscript.
Is there anything unusual about a thesis or dissertation in IEEE?
The degree level occupies the slot where a publisher would go: “Ph.D. dissertation” or “M.S. thesis”, written out in that abbreviated form. It is not bracketed the way Vancouver brackets [dissertation].
What else catches people out here?
IEEE names and abbreviates the department, which no other major style does — “Dept. Elect. Comput. Eng.” If the thesis does not state a department, give the school or faculty instead of guessing.
Can I reformat this thesis or dissertation 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.
