Select the IEEE output style in EndNote and in Word, then compare the bibliography with three real records before you submit.
General IEEE or a journal-specific style
Start with IEEE in EndNote if your assignment or submission instructions ask for general IEEE format. For a journal submission, open the journal’s current author instructions first. If the editor names an EndNote style or supplies a file, use that exact name or file. Searching for the full journal title in the EndNote Style Finder is more precise than choosing the first result that contains “IEEE.”
A style name can hide a local adaptation. The Georgia Tech Optics Laboratory changelog lists IEEE_GTERMS.ens version 8.0, dated Nov. 22, 2024. That revision changed how the style supplies a label for a master’s thesis. Keep the exact file name, its source and any published revision date with your manuscript notes. If your team has two copies called IEEE, this gives you a way to tell which one produced the bibliography. See the Georgia Tech changelog.
About this guide. The menus below follow Clarivate’s EndNote 2025 documentation. The desktop application and Word add-in were not tested for this article. The three references are hand-checked comparison examples based on publisher records and the IEEE guide.
Install and select the EndNote IEEE output style
- In EndNote, open Tools → Output Styles → Open Style Manager. Look for the exact style name. If it is already installed, tick its box to add it to the style menu.
- If it is missing, use the Style Finder or the file supplied by your journal. Copy the downloaded
.ensfile to your personal Styles folder. Check Folder Locations in EndNote preferences if you are unsure where that folder is. Restart EndNote, then look for the style again in Style Manager. - Open the manuscript in desktop Word. In the EndNote tab, use the Style menu to select the IEEE style you want. Choose Select Another Style if it is absent from the short list. Run Update Citations and Bibliography and check the style name shown in Word.
These steps assume you already use EndNote Desktop and Cite While You Write. See Clarivate’s instructions for adding a style on Windows, adding a style on macOS and choosing it in Word.
If Word still shows author and year after the library preview switches to IEEE, check the Style menu in Word first. If it shows temporary citations in braces, check Instant Formatting and run the update. A number typed directly into the document stays ordinary text. Use an EndNote citation field when the number needs to follow the bibliography. See Clarivate’s citation update guidance.
Compare the library preview with the Word bibliography
Style Manager shows built-in examples. To inspect a specific record, select it in the library and open the preview under the same style you chose in Word. That view helps you check the entry itself. In Word you can also check where the entry lands and which number it gets. See Clarivate’s Style Manager help and its desktop preview guide.
In a scratch document, cite the journal article, then the conference paper, then the book. Cite the article again in a second paragraph. With a general IEEE style, expect [1], [2], [3], then [1] again, with three bibliography entries. Here are the entries to compare. Exact punctuation and optional fields can vary with the destination’s instructions.
- Journal Article
[1] Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton, “Deep learning,” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, pp. 436–444, May 2015, doi: 10.1038/nature14539.
Check that 521 landed in Volume, 7553 in Issue and 436–444 in Pages. Compare with the Nature record.
- Conference Paper
[2] A. Vaswani et al., “Attention is all you need,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 30, 2017, pp. 5998–6008.
Check the proceedings title and page range against the conference version. An import from arXiv describes the preprint and can lack both fields. See the NeurIPS record.
- Book
[3] T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, 2nd ed. New York, NY, USA: Springer, 2009.
Keep the edition in its own field. Springer lists it in the display subtitle and separately as edition 2. Copying both into the title and edition fields can print it twice. See the Springer record.
Try one more edit in the scratch file. Move the conference citation ahead of the first journal citation and update the bibliography. The conference paper should now be [1], and both mentions of the journal article should be [2]. If a number stays behind, check whether you moved the citation field or pasted only its visible text. If the same article gets two different numbers, check which library record each citation points to. A duplicate import can give the same paper two records.
Verify the output against the required guide
If one entry is missing its pages, look at its reference type and Pages field first. If every conference entry loses its proceedings title, compare the style template with the fields your records use. When journal titles stay long, check both the style’s Journal Names setting and the matching entry in the Journals term list. Clarivate explains how the style substitutes a journal abbreviation.
Check author initials and the use of et al. against the IEEE Reference Guide and your destination’s examples. Use the IEEE author guide for names that need closer inspection and the journal abbreviation guide to verify short titles.
If a style copy behaves differently on a collaborator’s computer, compare the selected file and the abbreviation list before editing the manuscript. The same short name in Word can refer to different local style files.
Make record corrections in EndNote, then refresh Word. For a template correction, save a clearly named copy of the style and select that copy in Word. If you write in Apple Pages, follow that editor’s workflow. Before submission, reopen the actual manuscript and trace its first bracketed number to the first reference. Then spot-check the remaining entries by source type.