Reading and Reviewing Papers › Module 6: Citing properly

Citation styles: APA and IEEE

Lesson 2 of 3 · 3 min

A citation style is a set of rules for how citations look: what goes in the text, what goes in the reference list, and in what order. Every journal and conference names the style it wants. There are two families.

The two families

Family	In the text	Reference list order	Styles
Author–date	(Keshav, 2007)	A to Z by surname	APA, Harvard, Chicago author-date
Numbered	[1] or a superscript ¹	In order of first use	IEEE, Vancouver, ACM, Nature

Author–date: In the text: (Keshav, 2007); Reference list order: A to Z by surname; Styles: APA, Harvard, Chicago author-date

Numbered: In the text: [1] or a superscript ¹; Reference list order: In order of first use; Styles: IEEE, Vancouver, ACM, Nature

A third kind, notes, puts sources in footnotes (Chicago notes-bibliography). It is used mostly in history and the humanities.

IEEE in detail

IEEE is the most common style in engineering and computer science, so learn it well.

In the text: a number in square brackets, inside the sentence, before the full stop. Numbers go in order of first use; reuse the same number if you cite the same source again.

One source: Papers can be read in three passes [1].
Several: as shown in [2], [4]–[6].
As a noun: In [3], the authors argue that...

Journal article:

[1] S. Keshav, "How to read a paper," ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 83–84, Jul. 2007, doi: 10.1145/1273445.1273458.

Conference paper:

[2] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, "Deep residual learning for image recognition," in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. (CVPR), 2016, pp. 770–778.

Preprint:

[3] A. Vaswani et al., "Attention is all you need," 2017, arXiv:1706.03762.

Website:

[4] arXiv, "Moderation." Accessed: Nov. 8, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/

Rules to notice: initials before surnames; titles of papers in "quotes"; journal or conference names in italics and shortened by the official IEEE list; use "et al." when there are more than six authors.

The other major styles

Style	Used in	Journal article example
APA 7	Psychology, education, social sciences	Keshav, S. (2007). How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), 83–84. https://doi.org/10.1145/1273445.1273458
Harvard	Many UK and Australian universities; business	Keshav, S. (2007) 'How to read a paper', ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), pp. 83–84.
MLA 9	Languages and literature	Keshav, S. "How to Read a Paper." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 37, no. 3, 2007, pp. 83–84.
Chicago	History, humanities, some sciences	Keshav, S. 2007. "How to Read a Paper." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 37 (3): 83–84.
Vancouver	Medicine and life sciences	1. Keshav S. How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Comput Commun Rev. 2007;37(3):83–4.
ACM	ACM conferences and journals in computing	[1] S. Keshav. 2007. How to read a paper. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37, 3 (July 2007), 83–84.

APA 7: Used in: Psychology, education, social sciences; Journal article example: Keshav, S. (2007). How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), 83–84. https://doi.org/10.1145/1273445.1273458

Harvard: Used in: Many UK and Australian universities; business; Journal article example: Keshav, S. (2007) 'How to read a paper', ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 37(3), pp. 83–84.

MLA 9: Used in: Languages and literature; Journal article example: Keshav, S. "How to Read a Paper." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 37, no. 3, 2007, pp. 83–84.

Chicago: Used in: History, humanities, some sciences; Journal article example: Keshav, S. 2007. "How to Read a Paper." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 37 (3): 83–84.

Vancouver: Used in: Medicine and life sciences; Journal article example: 1. Keshav S. How to read a paper. ACM SIGCOMM Comput Commun Rev. 2007;37(3):83–4.

ACM: Used in: ACM conferences and journals in computing; Journal article example: [1] S. Keshav. 2007. How to read a paper. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37, 3 (July 2007), 83–84.

Harvard has no single official version, so universities each publish their own guide. Follow yours.

Let software do the formatting

Do not type reference lists by hand. A reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley) or BibTeX in LaTeX formats them in any style with one click. Your job is to check that the stored details are right: authors, year, title, venue and DOI.

RememberFind out which style the venue wants, use it the same way everywhere, and let your reference manager do the typing.