IEEE Citation Specifications

CSL Development
1

Dear XBiblio Development Team,
I am working on CSL citations for the Zotero project. One of the citation
formats that I have been looking at is the IEEE citation style, which is
turning out to be difficult for a number of reasons:

  1. The indentation is not supported by CSL. IEEE requires all reference
    lists to be numbered, and all citation numbers must be written in the left
    margin, with the entry’s information taking up the whole text column.

  2. IEEE has different formats depending on how you obtained the item. For
    example, a citation for a book found in print form might look like this:
    J. K. Author, “Title of chapter in the book,” in Title of His Published Book,
    xth ed. City of Publisher, Country if not USA: Abbrev. of Publisher, year,
    ch. x, sec. x, pp. xxx–xxx.
    If the same book were to be found online, the formatting would be radically
    different:
    J. K. Author. (year, month day). Title (edition) [Type of medium].
    volume(issue). Available: http://url
    In most cases, a researcher would be using the print form of the citation,
    but using the print form for all books wouldn’t work for items in the public
    domain that have been posted online. Also, the formatting is slightly
    different depending on the method of online retrieval (for example, FTP vs.
    email vs. Telnet). IEEE makes similar distinctions for other types of items
    (articles, reports, etc.).

  3. IEEE requires issue numbers to be listed as ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd,
    3rd, etc.), while most websites list them as cardinal numbers (1, 2, 3,
    etc.). When Zotero reads information from a web page, the cardinal form of
    the number is read in. So far, I don’t know how to convert cardinal numbers
    to ordinal numbers, except for using “th edition” as a suffix, which doesn’t
    always work.

If you know how to resolve these issues, please reply to this e-mail. More
information on the IEEE citation style is available at
http://www.ieee.org/portal/cms_docs_iportals/iportals/publications/authors/transjnl/stylemanual.pdf
.

Thanks,
Ramesh Srigiriraju

2

Hi Ramesh,

Ramesh Srigiriraju wrote:

Dear XBiblio Development Team,
I am working on CSL citations for the Zotero project.

Great!

One of the
citation formats that I have been looking at is the IEEE citation style,
which is turning out to be difficult for a number of reasons:

  1. The indentation is not supported by CSL. IEEE requires all
    reference lists to be numbered, and all citation numbers must be written
    in the left margin, with the entry’s information taking up the whole
    text column.

So the number label effectively gets a negative indent. Simon, we need
to think about how to fit this in, a la hanging indents.

  1. IEEE has different formats depending on how you obtained the
    item. For example, a citation for a book found in print form might look
    like this:
    J. K. Author, “Title of chapter in the book,” in Title of His Published
    Book, xth ed. City of Publisher, Country if not USA: Abbrev. of
    Publisher, year, ch. x, sec. x, pp. xxx–xxx.
    If the same book were to be found online, the formatting would be
    radically different:
    J. K. Author. (year, month day). Title (edition) [Type of medium].
    volume(issue). Available: http://url

Hmm … these are different kinds of items in any case. The first is a
chapter in a book, while the second is a book proper.

I’m looking at the examples in the PDF file, and I have to say this is a
really brain-dead style guide. It really has no logic.

That said, CSL needs to be able to support this kind of thing, if not
perfectly, then better.

In most cases, a researcher would be using the print form of the
citation, but using the print form for all books wouldn’t work for items
in the public domain that have been posted online. Also, the formatting
is slightly different depending on the method of online retrieval (for
example, FTP vs. email vs. Telnet).

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect Zotero and other
applications–and CSL–to be able to do more than to handle URIs. E.g.:

ftp://path
telnet://path

… and so forth. I also tend to think this would likely be acceptable
for the journal. You might want to ask them, as a lot of these
conventions were obviously invented a long time ago. I can’t imagine
they’d really object to having a straight URI rather than doing:

R. J. Vidmar. (1994). On the use of atmospheric plasmas as
electromagnetic reflectors [Online]. Available FTP:
atmnext.usc.edu Directory: pub/etext/1994 File: atmosplasma.txt

E.g. would they REALLY not accept:

R. J. Vidmar. (1994). On the use of atmospheric plasmas as
electromagnetic reflectors [Online]. Available
ftp://atmnext.usc.edu/pub/etext/1994/atmosplasma.txt

…? Can you perhaps ask them, and tell them the issue?

IEEE makes similar distinctions for other types of items (articles, reports, etc.).

  1. IEEE requires issue numbers to be listed as ordinal numbers (1st,
    2nd, 3rd, etc.), while most websites list them as cardinal numbers (1,
    2, 3, etc.). When Zotero reads information from a web page, the
    cardinal form of the number is read in. So far, I don’t know how to
    convert cardinal numbers to ordinal numbers, except for using “th
    edition” as a suffix, which doesn’t always work.

Damn, this style is a PITA!

I think the way to do this is some kind of configuration option for
numbers. We don’t support that ATM.

If you know how to resolve these issues, please reply to this e-mail.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I see any solutions at the moment for these
problems.

As you can see on the list, Simon and I are experimenting with some
changes to CSL, and we’ll consider this along with that.

So, book:

B. Klaus and P. Horn, Robot Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.

Online book (like a report):

S. Khutaina. (1995, Aug. 15). EMBASE handbook (3rd ed.) [Online]. 3(21).
Available: Knowledge Index File: EMBASE Handbook (EMHB)

Experimenting a bit here, it might mean something like this for the
funky online resource stuff (not complete, but just brain-storming).

Bruce