How to remove the "References" title

Add these lines to the preamble:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\patchcmd{\thebibliography}{\section*{\refname}}{}{}{}

A complete example:

\begin{filecontents*}{aaaaabbbbbb.bib}
@misc{test,
title= "The title",
howpublished= "Publisher"
}
\end{filecontents*}
\documentclass{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\patchcmd{\thebibliography}{\section*{\refname}}{}{}{}

\begin{document}
\cite{test}
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{aaaaabbbbbb}

\end{document}

Since IEEEtran.cls automatically adds an entry for the references in the ToC, you might also be interested in suppressing this entry (after all, there's no section for the references); in this case, you will also have to add

\patchcmd{\thebibliography}{\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{\refname}}{}{}{}

If you don't mind using biblatex instead of bibtex, you could simply use the following: \printbibliography[heading=none].

Dependencies:

• biblatex
• biblatex-ieee (for the IEEE bibliography style)

Here's a minimal example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=ieee]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{refs.bib}

\begin{document}

\section{Some section}
Some text \cite{KandR}.

\printbibliography[heading=none]

\end{document}

For the sake of completeness, here is the content of the refs.bib file used:

@BOOK
  {KandR,
   AUTHOR    = {Kernighan, Brian W. and Ritchie, Dennis M.},
   TITLE     = {The C Programming Language Second Edition},
   PUBLISHER = {Prentice-Hall, Inc.},
   YEAR      = 1988
  }

After compiling the document with latexmk -bibtex -pdf, the result should look like this:

I think something easier would be \renewcommand\refname{}