Not a lot of people know how to do proper IEEE referencing in Word 2007 or 2010. The benefits of doing this are immense both for individuals and teams. It allows automatic renumbering of references, automatic bibliography creation, as well as providing a collection of your references in one file – even when multiple people work on the same document. This also works on OS X, you just need to find the corresponding folders. Sounds appealing? Right, let’s get started.

IEEE Reference Style

First thing’s first, download the above file. It’s hosted on my server, but the original is created by Yves at Codeplex. You can check that out as well.

Next, you’re going to want to copy the file to:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office 12\Bibliography\Style

Depending on your installation it may be in a different location (i.e. 64-bit installation) but I’m sure you can figure this out.

Start up Microsoft Word (or restart it if it was open). Now browse to the References tab on the ribbon. Under the Citations & Bibliography section (highlighted below), click Style and a new item should have appeared, choose IEEE.

IEEE Style in Word 2007

With this selected we need to start by entering our first reference. So click Manage Sources. You should be presented with this dialog box. I filled it in with some information from a journal article but you could just as easily use a website, book, magazine, etc.

Creating a source for the first time

After you’re done, this reference will show up in your list of sources. As you can see I have many others (all related to this one word document). My methodology is to add to this list of sources as I go, rather than all at once at the end of a report. It proves much simpler in the end.

List of all sources available in this document

Now, when I want to use one of these sources all I have to do is click Insert Citation (from the Citations & Bibliography section), and choose the citation I want. You should see a number appear encased in square brackets, [1]. That’s your first IEEE reference. You can repeat this as many times as you want with the same reference or new ones. When you’re done you’re going to want to create a list of references. Scroll down to the bottom of your document and click Bibliography and then choose either one, it doesn’t matter. I usually remove the words “Bibliography” and replace it with something less Artsy, like “References” (sorry Arts students but you had tons of reference styles to choose from off the bat, so you’re lucky!).

Create a bibliography from your list of used sources

Voilà you should be very happy with your new IEEE style referencing in Word.

I’d like to mention, but won’t go into detail, that with the software, Mendeley (my chosen research tool), you can get a word plugin that will do all of this as well. It’s not as tight, but at least you don’t have to enter in all your references details if it gets it from the citation. But that’s not for this post anyways – I will write something up on Mendeley and Word integration later.

Updated for OS X

In order to get this working on your version of Microsoft Office 2011 on Mac OS X, the folder location specified above needs to be:

/applications/Microsoft Office 2011

Here are some detailed steps from a random old forum I found online:

• Unzip the IEEE_Reference.zip file that you downloaded
• Close Word if it’s open
• Open Applications
• Navigate into the Microsoft Office folder
• Right click on the file Word.app or just Word if you have the file extensions hidden, click ‘Show Package Contents’
• There should now be a folder called Contents, open the folder.
• Then open Resources
• Then open Styles
• Copy the .xml style you want into this folder
• Launch the Word application and the styles you copied in should be available.

Happy referencing!