References for IEEE S&P (“Oakland”)

What IEEE S&P (“Oakland”) expects

• Manuscript format: LaTeX only
• Template: IEEEtran (“compsoc” conference option) — \documentclass[conference,compsoc]{IEEEtran}
• Citation style: Numbered, bracketed citations (e.g. [1], [2]) — IEEEtran's standard bibliography style.

The IEEEtran class is built to manage references through BibTeX; a call for papers that requires IEEEtran in practice means preparing your bibliography as a .bib file.

Setting up the bibliography

In your main .tex file, where the reference list should appear:

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{refs}

IEEEtran ships its own .bst of the same name, so the style line matches the class. Build with pdflatex, then bibtex, then pdflatex twice more, so both the in-text citations and the reference list resolve.

Things that catch people out

• A numbered IEEEtran bibliography lists entries in citation order, not alphabetically, so renumbering happens automatically when you reorder the text.
• Loading the cite package lets \cite{a,b,c} compress into [1]-[3]; without it you get [1], [2], [3].