How to Cite a Conference Paper in IEEE Style

Quick Answer

IEEE conference paper format (published proceedings):

[#] A. B. Author, C. D. Author, and E. F. Author, "Title of paper," in Abbrev. Conf. Title (Acronym), City, Country, Year, pp. xxx-xxx, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxxx.

Worked example:

[1] R. K. Gupta and S. M. Lee, "A novel framework for real-time speech recognition in noisy environments," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process. (ICASSP), Rhodes, Greece, 2023, pp. 4210-4214, doi: 10.1109/ICASSP49357.2023.10095123.

In-text citation: [1]

Three rules that catch most people out:

• The conference title is preceded by "in" (lowercase, not italicized) and is italicized itself. This is the single feature that separates a conference paper from a journal article in IEEE: journal articles do not use "in".
• Use the abbreviated conference title, not the full one. "Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process." not "Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing." Conference acronyms (ICASSP, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICRA) follow the abbreviated title in parentheses.
• Include city and country, even for virtual conferences. When a conference was held virtually, write "virtual" in place of the city. Skipping the location is a common error.

Need to format dozens of references at once? Paste any IEEE Xplore or DOI link into the AllCitations IEEE generator and get a correctly formatted reference in seconds.

What Counts as a Conference Paper in IEEE?

In IEEE style a "conference paper" is any peer-reviewed contribution that appears in the formal proceedings of a conference, symposium, workshop, or congress. The IEEE Reference Guide (2024 ed., section IV) treats the following as conference papers for citation purposes:

• A full paper in the main proceedings of a conference (ICASSP, CVPR, ISIT, INFOCOM, etc.)
• An extended abstract or short paper in the same proceedings
• A workshop paper colocated with a main conference (the workshop has its own proceedings or a section in the main proceedings)
• A poster paper that appears in the published proceedings
• A late-breaking results paper, when it appears in the proceedings

A talk that is presented but never written up, or a paper that exists only as a slide deck, is not a conference paper for IEEE citation purposes. Cite those as unpublished material (see the Special Cases section below). For a deeper overview of how IEEE treats every source type, see the IEEE generator overview.

The Six Required Elements

The IEEE Reference Guide lists six elements for a published conference paper. The order is fixed, and the punctuation between them is non-negotiable.

1. Author(s). Initials before surname, periods after each initial, "and" before the last author. Six or more authors collapse to "et al." after the first author.
2. "Title of paper," in double quotation marks, sentence case, with a comma inside the closing quotation mark.
3. in Abbreviated Conference Title (Acronym), italicized, preceded by lowercase "in" and a comma. Conference acronyms in parentheses if the conference is widely known by one (ICASSP, CVPR, NeurIPS).
4. City, Country, in plain text, with a comma between city and country, and another comma after the country. Use "virtual" for fully virtual conferences.
5. Year, four digits.
6. pp. xxx-xxx, page range with "pp." prefix and an en-dash (rendered as a hyphen on most keyboards). Single-page papers use "p. xxx".

Two optional elements close the entry:

• doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxxx when a DOI is available. IEEE strongly recommends including the DOI for any paper indexed in IEEE Xplore or CrossRef.
• Month between the year and pages, abbreviated to three letters (Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., May, Jun., Jul., Aug., Sep., Oct., Nov., Dec.). Most students omit it; it is required only when the conference spans multiple events in the same year.

The full template, with every element in position:

[#] A. Author, "Title," in Abbrev. Conf. Title (Acronym), City, Country, Mon. Year, pp. xxx-xxx, doi: 10.xxxx/xxxxxx.

For more on IEEE's six-element structure across other source types, see How to Cite in IEEE Style and the IEEE generator.

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Worked Examples

The eight examples below cover the conference paper variants you are most likely to encounter. Each shows the reference list entry and a sample in-text citation.

1. Standard Conference Paper in Published Proceedings

This is the canonical case: a peer-reviewed paper in the formal proceedings of an IEEE-sponsored conference, available through IEEE Xplore.

Reference entry:

[1] R. K. Gupta and S. M. Lee, "A novel framework for real-time speech recognition in noisy environments," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process. (ICASSP), Rhodes, Greece, 2023, pp. 4210-4214, doi: 10.1109/ICASSP49357.2023.10095123.

In-text citation: As demonstrated by Gupta and Lee [1], the framework achieved a 15% improvement in recognition accuracy.

The abbreviated conference title "Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process." is italicized; the acronym "ICASSP" in parentheses is also italicized because it is part of the title element. The DOI uses lowercase "doi:" with a single space before the number.

2. Conference Paper with Three or More Authors

IEEE lists every author by name up to five. At six or more, collapse to the first author followed by "et al."

Reference entry (five authors):

[2] A. Patel, B. Nguyen, C. Hernandez, D. Park, and E. Reynolds, "Federated learning under non-IID client distributions," in Proc. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. (ICML), Honolulu, HI, USA, 2023, pp. 17221-17235.

Reference entry (six or more authors):

[3] L. Chen et al., "Efficient transformer attention for vision tasks," in Proc. IEEE/CVF Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. (CVPR), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2023, pp. 8312-8321, doi: 10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.00801.

In-text citation: [3]

For US conferences, the location format is "City, ST, USA" with a two-letter state abbreviation. Canadian locations use "City, Province, Canada". European and Asian conferences use "City, Country" without a regional code.

3. Conference Paper from IEEE Xplore (with DOI)

Most modern IEEE conference papers are indexed in IEEE Xplore and assigned a DOI. The DOI replaces the URL; do not include both.

Reference entry:

[4] M. Tanaka, K. Suzuki, and H. Yamamoto, "Quantum error correction with surface codes on superconducting hardware," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Quantum Comput. Eng. (QCE), Bellevue, WA, USA, 2023, pp. 712-721, doi: 10.1109/QCE57702.2023.00084.

In-text citation: [4]

To find the DOI for an IEEE Xplore paper, look for the "DOI:" field on the abstract page, or copy it from the citation export. Pasting the IEEE Xplore URL into the AllCitations IEEE generator extracts the DOI and all other metadata automatically.

4. Workshop Paper Colocated with a Main Conference

Many machine learning, computer vision, and robotics conferences host workshops on the day before or after the main event. Workshop papers usually have their own proceedings, but the workshop name follows the main conference name in the citation.

Reference entry:

[5] J. Okafor and L. Vasquez, "Self-supervised feature learning for low-resource medical imaging," in Proc. CVPR Workshop Med. Comput. Vis., Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2023, pp. 145-152.

In-text citation: [5]

If the workshop paper has its own DOI (some workshops register a separate proceedings on IEEE Xplore or ACM Digital Library), include it. If not, the entry ends after the page range.

Note that workshop papers go through a less rigorous review than main-conference papers. If your reader needs to know that this is workshop work rather than main-track work, the title element ("Proc. CVPR Workshop ...") signals this clearly.

5. Virtual Conference (No Physical Location)

Conferences held entirely online use "virtual" as the location. This was extremely common during 2020-2022 and remains an option for many conferences today.

Reference entry:

[6] S. Kim and R. Andersson, "Adversarial robustness of vision transformers under distribution shift," in Proc. Int. Conf. Learn. Represent. (ICLR), virtual, 2021, pp. 1-12.

In-text citation: [6]

When a conference uses a hybrid format and the paper itself was presented in person at a specific city, you may use that city. When the entire event was online, use "virtual". Some IEEE Reference Guide examples also accept "online" or omit the location entirely; the most defensible choice is "virtual" because it matches the IEEE Reference Guide 2024 examples.

6. Conference Paper Preprint on arXiv

A paper that has been accepted to a conference but not yet appeared in the official proceedings, or one that authors have posted as a preprint alongside the conference version, is cited differently depending on which version you are referring to.

Reference entry, citing the arXiv preprint:

[7] T. Reynolds, A. Carter, and B. Smith, "Scaling laws for instruction-tuned language models," 2024, arXiv:2402.04567.

Reference entry, citing the same paper after it appeared in NeurIPS proceedings:

[8] T. Reynolds, A. Carter, and B. Smith, "Scaling laws for instruction-tuned language models," in Proc. Conf. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. (NeurIPS), New Orleans, LA, USA, 2024, pp. 12001-12015.

In-text citation: [7] or [8]

Cite the proceedings version when it exists; cite the arXiv preprint only when the proceedings version is not yet available, or when the two versions differ substantially. arXiv references do not use "in" or italicized container titles because arXiv is not a conference proceedings.

7. Paper Accepted but Not Yet Published (In Press)

Papers that have been accepted to a conference but the proceedings have not yet been published use "to be published" in place of the page range. This is sometimes labelled "in press" in other styles; IEEE prefers "to be published".

Reference entry:

[9] H. Ellison and P. Murphy, "Privacy-preserving genomic analysis under differential privacy budgets," in Proc. IEEE Symp. Secur. Privacy (S&P), San Francisco, CA, USA, to be published.

In-text citation: [9]

Once the proceedings are published and you have a page range and DOI, update the reference. Editors and reviewers expect "to be published" entries to be replaced with full citations before final submission.

8. Single-Author Poster or Extended Abstract

Posters and extended abstracts that appear in the conference proceedings follow the same format as full papers. Some students drop the "in" because they think a poster is not a "real" conference paper. It is.

Reference entry:

[10] N. Whitfield, "A learned prior for monocular depth estimation under fog," in Proc. Brit. Mach. Vis. Conf. (BMVC), London, UK, 2023, pp. 47-48.

In-text citation: [10]

If the poster does not appear in published proceedings (a "demo only" poster, for example), it is unpublished material. Cite it as: "presented at" the conference, with no italics on the conference name and no page range. See the Special Cases section.

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Special Cases

Conference Acronyms in Parentheses

Many computing and engineering conferences are better known by their acronym (CVPR, NeurIPS, ICRA, INFOCOM, ICASSP) than by their full title. The IEEE Reference Guide allows two formats:

• Long form with acronym: Proc. IEEE/CVF Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. (CVPR)
• Acronym only: Proc. CVPR (acceptable in fields where the acronym is universally recognised)

The long-form-with-acronym version is the safest choice because it works for readers outside the immediate subfield. Use the acronym-only version only when your target journal or conference explicitly permits it.

The acronym goes in italicized parentheses because it is part of the conference title element. Do not put the acronym outside the italics.

Sponsoring Society in the Title

Some conferences include the sponsoring society in their official name (IEEE, ACM, IEEE/ACM, IEEE/CVF). Keep the society in the title:

• Proc. IEEE/CVF Int. Conf. Comput. Vis. (ICCV) (CVPR has IEEE/CVF; ICCV has IEEE/CVF)
• Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH (SIGGRAPH belongs to ACM, not IEEE)
• Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst. (IROS)

ACM-only conferences (SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI, KDD, NeurIPS in some years) follow the same IEEE template even though they are not IEEE-sponsored. The IEEE style is a citation format, not a content restriction; you can cite an ACM paper in IEEE style without changing anything.

Conference Held in Multiple Cities or Years

A few conferences run over multiple cities (a satellite event in Asia and Europe, for example) or split across multiple years (a paper accepted in 2022 but presented at the postponed 2023 event). Use the city and year that match the proceedings volume you are actually citing. If the proceedings cover both events, use the primary host city and the year listed on the proceedings cover.

Tutorials, Keynotes, and Panels

A tutorial paper or keynote address is rarely included in the formal proceedings. Cite it as unpublished material with the conference name in plain text and "presented at" instead of "in":

[11] J. Reynolds, "The future of post-quantum cryptography," presented at the IEEE Int. Conf. Cryptol. Inf. Secur., Lisbon, Portugal, 2023.

If the tutorial is included in the proceedings (some IEEE conferences publish tutorial materials), cite it as a normal conference paper.

Standards and Technical Reports Confused with Conference Papers

A standards document published by IEEE (e.g., IEEE 802.11) is not a conference paper. Cite it as a standard:

[12] IEEE Standard for Information Technology - Local and Metropolitan Area Networks - Specific Requirements - Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications, IEEE Standard 802.11-2020, 2021.

Mixing standards into the conference paper category is a common error in literature reviews on networking and wireless topics.

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Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Forgetting "in" before the conference title. A conference paper without "in" looks like a journal article. The pattern is "TitleOfPaper," in ConferenceTitle. Without "in", IEEE editors will mark the entry as malformed.

Using the full conference title instead of the abbreviation. "Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing" is wrong. The correct form is "Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech Signal Process. (ICASSP)". The IEEE Reference Guide and the LTWA (List of Title Word Abbreviations) maintained by the ISSN International Centre are the authoritative sources for these abbreviations.

Italicizing only the acronym, not the full title. The italics cover the entire conference title element, including the acronym in parentheses. Both (ICASSP) italicized and the long form italicized are correct. Italicizing only the acronym is wrong.

Putting periods inside the quotation marks of the paper title. IEEE places the comma inside the closing quote: "Title of paper," not "Title of paper". The comma goes inside; the period at the end of the entry goes outside.

Listing all authors when there are six or more. IEEE truncates at six or more authors to "FirstAuthor et al." The reference list does not list every author the way CSE does. This is a frequent error among students switching from biology or medical citation styles.

Forgetting the city and country. Even when the paper is on IEEE Xplore with a DOI, the city and country are required. Skipping them produces an incomplete reference. For virtual conferences, write "virtual".

Confusing CVPR and ICCV (and similar pairs). CVPR and ICCV are sponsored by IEEE/CVF. ECCV is sponsored by Springer (not IEEE). NeurIPS is sponsored by the NeurIPS Foundation. Always check the conference's actual sponsoring organisation rather than guessing; the sponsoring society appears in the conference title.

Using "Proc." for ACM conferences. ACM proceedings are typically titled "Proc." too, but some ACM conferences use "Companion Proc." for accompanying short papers. Match the proceedings title that actually appears on the cover.

Treating an arXiv preprint as a conference paper. An arXiv preprint is not in conference proceedings, even if the same paper has been accepted to a conference. Either cite the proceedings version (if available) or cite arXiv as a preprint with no "in" and no italicized container.

For a deeper comparison of IEEE to other engineering and science styles, see How to Cite in IEEE Style and How to Cite a Journal Article in CSE Style.

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Quick-Reference Table

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In-Text Citation Patterns

IEEE in-text citations are numbers in square brackets. The numbers refer to the position of the source in the reference list, which is ordered by first appearance in the text rather than alphabetically.

• Single source: "...as shown in [3]."
• Multiple non-consecutive sources: "...several studies [3], [7], [12]..."
• Range of consecutive sources: "...recent work [4]-[6]..."
• Author name with citation number: "Gupta and Lee [1] showed..." (the author's name is optional but improves readability)
• Citing the same source twice: Use the same number both times. Do not assign a new number.
• Citing a specific page: "[1, p. 4212]" or for a range, "[1, pp. 4212-4214]". Use this for direct quotations from a long paper.

The first time you cite a paper, IEEE allows you to mention the author's name in the sentence for context. After that, the number alone is sufficient. Conference paper citations follow the same rules as journal article citations in this respect.

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Tools and Resources

• AllCitations IEEE Generator: Paste an IEEE Xplore URL or DOI and generate a correctly formatted IEEE conference paper reference. Exports BibTeX or RIS for use in Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote.
• IEEE Reference Guide: The authoritative source for IEEE citation format, published by the IEEE Author Center. Section IV covers conference papers.
• IEEE Xplore: The official IEEE digital library. Every IEEE-published conference paper is indexed here with its DOI, abbreviated conference title, and full proceedings information.
• LTWA (List of Title Word Abbreviations): The authoritative source for journal and conference title abbreviations, maintained by the ISSN International Centre. IEEE follows LTWA conventions.
• CrossRef: Search any conference paper title to find its DOI. Adding a DOI to a reference takes 30 seconds and locks the citation to a specific paper version.

You can explore all the citation styles supported by AllCitations on our citation styles page.

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Related Citation Guides

• How to Cite in IEEE Style
• How to Cite a Journal Article in CSE Style
• How to Cite in Vancouver Style
• How to Cite a Journal Article in APA 7