In IEEE, a PDF is not its own source type — what matters is what the document IS: a journal article, a technical report, a government document, or a book. The format follows the content type, with a DOI or URL added if the source was accessed digitally.
The Golden Rule for Citing PDFs
Don't cite "a PDF" — cite what the PDF contains. A PDF article downloaded from IEEEXplore is cited as a journal article. A PDF technical report from NASA is cited as a technical report. The fact that it's a PDF is incidental — use the appropriate format for the document type, then add the URL or DOI.
Journal Article PDF (Most Common)
If you downloaded the paper as a PDF from IEEEXplore, IEEE, or any journal database, cite it as a standard journal article — the DOI tells readers how to find the original:
Example
[1] J. Chen and M. Liu, "Deep learning for medical image segmentation," IEEE Trans. Med. Imag., vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 1234–1248, May 2020, doi: 10.1109/TMI.2020.123456.
Technical Report (PDF)
Technical reports from universities, research institutions, or government agencies follow this format:
Format
[#] A. Author, "Title of Report," Institution Name, City, State/Country, Report No. XXXX, Mon. Year. [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Date].
Example
[2] L. Martinez and K. Brown, "Energy efficiency in data centers: a systems approach," MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, MA, USA, Tech. Rep. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2023-001, Mar. 2023. [Online]. Available: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/123456. [Accessed: Feb. 10, 2025].
White Paper (PDF)
Example
[3] Google DeepMind, "Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models," Google DeepMind, Mountain View, CA, USA, Dec. 2023. [Online]. Available: https://deepmind.google/research/publications/gemini. [Accessed: Jan. 15, 2025].
E-Book (Digital Book)
Cite an e-book the same as a print book — the ISBN or DOI handles the digital reference:
Format
[#] A. Author, Book Title, Xth ed. City: Publisher, Year. doi: 10.XXXX or [Online]. Available: URL.
Example
[4] I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, and A. Courville, Deep Learning. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2016. [Online]. Available: https://www.deeplearningbook.org.
Thesis or Dissertation (PDF)
Format
[#] A. Author, "Title of Thesis," M.S./Ph.D. thesis, Dept. Name, University, City, Year.
Example
[5] S. Patel, "Adversarial robustness in deep neural networks," Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Comput. Sci., Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA, USA, 2023.
Government or Standards Document (PDF)
Example — IEEE Standard
[6] IEEE, "IEEE Standard for Ethernet," IEEE Std 802.3-2022, Nov. 2022. doi: 10.1109/IEEESTD.2022.9844436.
Example — NIST PDF Report
[7] National Institute of Standards and Technology, "NIST Privacy Framework: A Tool for Improving Privacy Through Enterprise Risk Management," U.S. Dept. Commerce, Gaithersburg, MD, NIST Privacy Framework Version 1.0, Jan. 2020. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.CSWP.01162020. [Accessed: Mar. 5, 2025].
Cite PDFs and Digital Documents in IEEE — Free
Our IEEE citation generator handles journal articles, technical reports, theses, e-books, and more. Select the source type and let the tool format it correctly.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to mention "PDF" anywhere in an IEEE citation?▼
No. IEEE citations do not include a "[PDF]" tag or file format designation. The citation format is determined by the document type (journal article, report, book, etc.) — not by how you accessed or downloaded it.
How do I cite a PDF that has no author, no date, and no publisher?▼
For a PDF with no author, start with the organisation name or the title. For no date, omit the date field. For no publisher, omit that element. Include as much information as you can find. At minimum, provide the title and [Online]. Available: URL. [Accessed: Date]. If the document has very little identifying information, consider whether it is a reliable enough source to cite.
Should I include the PDF URL in the reference?▼
Include a DOI if available — this is preferred. If there is no DOI, include the URL of the document with [Online]. Available: notation. For journal articles available on a database (IEEEXplore, Scopus, etc.), the DOI is sufficient — you do not need the database URL.