Those are my rules when writing the reference list. The goal is to create a consistent format. Otherwise, for the same conference/journal, you might see multiple different names in the references, which seems sloppy.

First, use software such as JabRef to organize your .bib file. In JabRef, there is a spreadsheet like design, allowing you to quickly verify whether the same conference has a consistent name.

For conferences, I use the following format:

<Acronym of the conference with year in 2-digit>: Proceedings of the <Full name of the conference> <year in 4 digit>, page: <page number>, <year>

For instance,

• SC ’01: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 2001 Conference on Supercomputing, pages 45–45, 2001.
• VIS ’02: Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization 2002, pages 347–354, 2002.
• VIS ’05: Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization 2005, pages 231–238, 2005.
• PVG ’01: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-data Visualization and Graphics 2001, pages 45–50, 2001.

Note that for the same conference, you might see different names from different sources. You should choose one and use it consistent in your paper. For IEEE Vis, I write it as IEEE Visualization.

For journals, I use the following format:

<Full name of the journal>, <Volume> (<Issue>): <page number>, <year>

For instance,

• Computer Graphics Forum, 21(2):137–149, 2002.
• IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12(5):1213–20, 2006.
• IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 16(5):815–28, 2010.
• IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 3(4):370–380, 1997.

Usually I remove the following fields:

• Month
• Location
• Publisher
• Editors

Note: The rule here is mainly for conference/journals. For other types of references such as manuals or technical reports, I do not have concrete rules yet.

The take home message is:

Be Consistent!