Practical examples of IEEE format footnotes for modern research papers

Real-world examples of IEEE format footnotes in published-style text

IEEE style is famously strict about references, but it’s surprisingly flexible with footnotes. The best examples of IEEE format footnotes usually fall into a few repeatable patterns: author notes, funding lines, dataset access, legal notices, standards references, and technical clarifications.

Here’s a short paragraph with several realistic examples of IEEE format footnotes embedded the way you’d see them in a conference paper:

The experiments were conducted on a private clinical dataset, available to qualified researchers under a data use agreement.\(*\) The preliminary version of this work appeared in an earlier workshop paper.\(\dagger\) A subset of the results was independently validated by an external laboratory.\(\ddagger\)

*Data access requests should be directed to the Institutional Review Board of Example University, Boston, MA, USA.

\daggerA preliminary version of this work appeared in the Proc. 2023 IEEE Int. Conf. on Healthcare Informatics.

\ddaggerIndependent validation was performed by the Clinical Analytics Core, Example Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA.

That small block already gives you three concrete examples of IEEE format footnotes: a data access note, a prior-publication note, and a validation note.

Examples of examples of IEEE format footnotes for author and affiliation notes

Author and affiliation notes are some of the most common examples of IEEE format footnotes in real papers. When the author list is complicated—multiple institutions, equal contributions, or a corresponding author—you often see symbols like *, †, ‡ tied to footnotes rather than cluttering the main text.

Here’s a realistic example of how this looks under an IEEE-style title block:

J. Smith*, A. Patel†, and L. Chen‡, Member, IEEE

*Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA

†Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

‡Corresponding author (email: lchen@example.edu).

In practice, these examples of IEEE format footnotes help you:

• Clarify which author belongs to which institution without overloading the author line.
• Mark a corresponding author with contact information.
• Indicate equal contribution, for example:

*J. Smith and A. Patel contributed equally to this work.

If you’re submitting to an IEEE journal, always check the specific author guidelines. Many journals provide their own example of how to place these symbols and footnotes in the template, and using those examples of IEEE format footnotes will keep you aligned with editorial expectations.

Example of IEEE format footnote for funding and grant information

Funding information can go in an acknowledgments section, but some IEEE venues still accept or prefer a short funding footnote attached to the title or first page. These examples of IEEE format footnotes typically reference grant numbers, agencies, and sometimes industry sponsors.

A realistic example tied to the title might look like this:

Title — “Efficient Edge AI for Medical Imaging*”

*This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CNS-2310456, and in part by the National Institutes of Health under Grant R01-HL160123.

Another example of a more detailed funding footnote:

*This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grants CNS-2310456 and IIS-2245010, by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under Grant R01-HL160123, and by a research gift from Example Technologies, Inc.

These examples of examples of IEEE format footnotes do two things: they keep the funding language compact and they separate it cleanly from the technical narrative. If you need accurate agency names or grant formatting, check sources like the NSF or NIH sites, which show how grants are officially styled.

Examples include dataset access, code availability, and reproducibility notes

Reproducibility is a big deal in 2024–2025. Many IEEE conferences now encourage authors to provide dataset and code links. While these often go in a dedicated section, some authors use footnotes to keep URLs out of the main text.

Here’s an example of IEEE format footnote usage for datasets:

We evaluate the proposed model on the MIMIC-IV critical care dataset.(*)

*Access to the MIMIC-IV dataset requires credentialed approval; see the official documentation at https://mimic.mit.edu.

And another example of a code availability footnote:

All code and configuration files used in this study are publicly available.\(\dagger\)

\daggerThe implementation is available at https://github.com/example-lab/edge-ai-imaging (accessed Jan. 15, 2025).

These are realistic examples of IEEE format footnotes because they match current reproducibility trends: citing real datasets, using persistent URLs, and including an accessed date. If your work involves health data, it’s smart to align your privacy language with guidance from organizations like Harvard’s Office of Research Compliance or U.S. federal sites such as HHS.gov.

Best examples of IEEE format footnotes for standards, legal, and policy notes

Technical fields tied to standards or regulations often need short clarifications that don’t belong in the main argument. These are some of the best examples of IEEE format footnotes because they keep your prose clean while staying legally and technically precise.

Example of a standards-related IEEE footnote

Our implementation follows the IEEE 802.11ax standard for high-efficiency WLANs.(*)

*IEEE Standard 802.11ax-2021, “IEEE Standard for Information Technology—Telecommunications and Information Exchange Between Systems Local and Metropolitan Area Networks—Specific Requirements,” IEEE, New York, NY, USA, 2021.

This example of a footnote shows how to acknowledge a standard without disrupting the flow of the sentence. It mirrors the style you’d see in many IEEE Communications Society papers.

Example of a legal or policy disclaimer footnote

In areas like medicine, public health, or security, you sometimes need disclaimers. Here’s a realistic example of IEEE format footnote language that would fit a health-informatics paper:

The risk scores generated by the proposed model are intended for research use only.\(\dagger\)

\daggerThe views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or any other funding agency. The model outputs are not intended to replace clinical judgment. For general health information, consult resources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at https://www.cdc.gov or the Mayo Clinic at https://www.mayoclinic.org.

These examples include both a disclaimer and references to authoritative health sources. That combination is increasingly common in 2024–2025, especially when papers touch clinical decision-making or public policy.

Examples of IEEE format footnotes for AI tools and large language models (2024–2025 trend)

One of the biggest new trends is transparency about AI tools used during research or writing. Many editors now expect at least one example of a disclosure statement when generative AI is involved. IEEE hasn’t mandated a single standard sentence yet, but you can design your own examples of IEEE format footnotes that follow general research integrity guidelines.

Here’s a realistic example tied to the end of the introduction:

Parts of the text were edited using a large language model (LLM) to improve clarity.(*)

*A large language model (OpenAI ChatGPT, accessed Oct. 2025) was used for language editing only. All technical content, data analysis, and conclusions were designed and verified by the authors.

Another example of a more detailed AI-use footnote:

\daggerThe authors used automated tools for grammar checking and figure caption suggestions. No AI tools were used to generate or alter experimental data, numerical results, or statistical analyses.

These examples of examples of IEEE format footnotes match 2024–2025 expectations: they specify which AI tools were used, when they were accessed, and what they did not do. If your institution or publisher has its own AI policy, use that as your primary example of acceptable wording.

Examples of technical clarification and notation footnotes

Sometimes you need a quick aside to clarify notation, acronyms, or assumptions without dragging the main discussion off track. That’s where some of the cleanest examples of IEEE format footnotes show up.

Consider a signal-processing paper:

Throughout this paper, we assume a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz for all audio signals.(*)

*Unless otherwise specified, all signals are real-valued, discrete-time sequences with a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz.

Or a machine learning example of a notation footnote:

We use the term “validation set” to refer to the portion of the training data held out for hyperparameter tuning.\(\dagger\)

\daggerThis definition differs from the common three-way split (train/validation/test) used in some machine learning textbooks, where the validation set is considered distinct from the training set.

These examples of IEEE format footnotes keep the main text focused while still documenting assumptions in a way that reviewers can easily find.

How to format these examples of IEEE format footnotes in IEEE style

Knowing the wording is half the job. The other half is formatting the examples of IEEE format footnotes so they don’t clash with the template.

In standard IEEE journal and conference templates:

• Footnote markers usually appear as superscript symbols or numbers directly after punctuation.
• The footnote text appears at the bottom of the same page or in a dedicated block under the first column.
• For author-related notes, symbols like *, †, ‡ are common; for general notes, numeric superscripts are more typical.

Here is a compact example of how a numeric footnote might look in a paragraph:

We used publicly available mortality statistics from the CDC WONDER database.¹

¹Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “CDC WONDER,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, https://wonder.cdc.gov (accessed Feb. 10, 2025).

That example of a numeric IEEE footnote doubles as a citation, which some authors prefer when they want to highlight a data source or online tool. For more guidance, you can compare this style with examples from university writing centers such as Purdue OWL, which often reference IEEE conventions.

FAQ: examples of IEEE format footnotes and common questions

Q1. Can you give a simple example of an IEEE format footnote for a corresponding author?
Yes. A typical example of a corresponding-author footnote in IEEE style is:

‡Corresponding author (email: jsmith@example.edu).

You attach the ‡ symbol to the author’s name in the author list and place the footnote on the first page.

Q2. Are footnotes allowed for regular references, or should I only use the reference list?
IEEE prefers numbered references in the reference list, but some real examples of IEEE format footnotes show URLs or database names in a footnote when they’re more like tools than traditional literature. For standard articles, books, and conference papers, keep using the reference list.

Q3. Do I need a footnote to disclose AI or LLM use in 2024–2025?
Many editors now recommend it. A short, factual disclosure like the AI examples of IEEE format footnotes shown above is usually enough, unless your journal has stricter wording. When in doubt, check your target venue’s author instructions.

Q4. Can I put dataset access information only in a footnote?
You can, but reviewers often prefer that you also mention datasets in the methods section. A good pattern is to use the main text for the dataset name and purpose, then add a footnote with the URL or access instructions, as in the MIMIC-IV and CDC examples included earlier.

Q5. Are there official IEEE templates with examples of footnotes?
Yes. IEEE provides LaTeX and Word templates that include at least one example of a footnote, especially for author affiliations and funding. Start from the official IEEE Author Center, then adapt your own examples of IEEE format footnotes to match the template you’re using.

By modeling your own notes on these real examples of IEEE format footnotes—author notes, funding, datasets, standards, disclaimers, AI disclosures, and technical clarifications—you’ll stay within IEEE norms while keeping your paper readable and transparent for reviewers and readers.