I would imagine that there is an official line on this, however I can't seem to find any detail of it. I am currently preparing a paper for an IET conference and would like to know what style the references should be presented in. The only relevant advice I have found on this is here. This suggests the "Vancouver" system, but this does not tie up with the one example in the template. (no "and" between author names, bold and italic used, etc). What do other people use/prefer and is there some official guidance I should be following? Thanks, John

Honest answer? Everyone will be very grateful that you've made an effort to present a paper at all, and won't mind too much!

Stick to something like the template and you should be fine. It's the content of the paper that's the important thing.

Hope all goes well with your presentation.

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Andy Millar CEng MIET MCMI

http://www.linkedin.com/in/millarandy

As you are preparing a paper for an IET conference you need to follow the guidance on the template page. The other link refers to papers for printed journals, not conference papers.

Thanks for the advice. The template given only provides an example of a journal reference, which I will certainly follow. I can definitely make a "best guess" at a style for other types of references (conference papers, patents, websites, etc) and I'm sure there won't be any complaints; however I was expecting that an organisation the size of the IET would have a prescribed and published format for the references across all conferences?

I'm surprised that this is not the case, but I'm sure I can work out something sensible.

To following up on this:

I used a format for other types of citation that was pretty similar to that prescribed for journals.

I've documented what I used here in case anyone has comments or would like to reuse it:
http://phdtools.blogspot.com/2...r-reference-style.html

Funnily enough, after I originally replied to this referencing became a major feature of my life, as I have been writing up the first part of my Master's thesis; the first time I've had to do formal referencing for many many years.

My feeling more than ever is that conforming to a particular referencing style is a handy stick to beat recalcitrant students with! Having just read through hundreds of journal articles with almost as many varieties of referencing I have never found one where I could not follow the reference - which is, after all, the point. Of course books and journals should have consistent styles within themselves, although the details of the style are (sorry!) not important. So here's a radical suggestion: wouldn't be nice if the whole academic world could - in the UK at least - decide on one referencing style and stick to it! Rather than every academic institute inventing their own style - you do have to wonder if some academics may have too much time on their hands Meanwhile, hats off to the IET for not being prescriptive about this, it's hard enough to find time to write conference papers without having to worry about whether the date of publication should be in brackets or not.

Anyway, the useful point for those who use Word is that the Citations tool (which I never knew existed until a couple of months ago) is excellent, it gives a reasonable choice of references and sorts out your bibligraphy for you. Even more useful, there are free sources of additional styles available for the Word tool which, being reasonably straightforward scripts, can be edited further (as I had to) to give the exact pedantry that your assessor requires

Learning to reference properly to a particular style is a vital part of learning academic research skills. Learning that it doesn't actually matter and that there are more important things to worry about is a vital part of learning to survive in industrial research without entering an early grave.

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Andy Millar CEng MIET MCMI

http://www.linkedin.com/in/millarandy

I am writing a paper for an IET journal but I am disappointed by a lack of author support in terms of templates and guidelines. I write in LaTeX and I had to spend several hours to prepare a custom biblatex template for the referencing system.

I have only previously written journal for the IEEE, the support is excellent. There is an entire 26 page PDF guide by Michael Shell, a LaTeX style package, a biblatex referencing package. It was as simple as to simply load the packages.