References in IEEEtran?

General Edit : IEEEtran is just for the author's convenience to get an idea of the approximate end product. The house-style of IEEE is not released and your (journal) article will be modified by the editors and copy-editors of the publication office. So no need to super tune your article, balance columns adjust biographies etc. when you are submitting the final version. A rough idea of what is what is enough.

Having said that I've removed my previous comment as it might be understood as it's Michael Shell's fault which is something that I would not even think. I'm not happy with IEEE and its workflow, that's about it.

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First of all, IEEE is really bad with conference style (I should probably say that the IEEEtran is getting old pretty fast.) and many conferences encourage their users to download the ieeeconf style from various sources. However, the following is not giving me any errors:

\documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{filecontents,lipsum}
\usepackage[noadjust]{cite}
\begin{filecontents*}{references.bib}
@article{Khoe:1994:CML:2288694.2294265,
    author = {Khoe, G. -D.},
    title = {Coherent multicarrier lightwave technology for flexible capacity networks},
    journal = {Comm. Mag.},
    issue_date = {March 1994},
    volume = {32},
    number = {3},
    month = mar,
    year = {1994},
    issn = {0163-6804},
    pages = {22--33},
    numpages = {12},
    url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/35.267438},
    doi = {10.1109/35.267438},
    acmid = {2294265},
    publisher = {IEEE Press},
    address = {Piscataway, NJ, USA},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\title{This document}
\author{This author}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\begin{abstract}
\lipsum[1]
\end{abstract}

\lipsum[2-6]
I have cited this document \cite{Khoe:1994:CML:2288694.2294265}

\bibliographystyle{ieeetran}
\bibliography{references}
\end{document}

LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item

It can be either due to;

1. Wrong path or name to citation file (*.bib). Note that the file-name or path is case sensitive and without extension. \bibliography{./citations}
2. There is no citation in the text, i.e. ~\cite{} ... You can temporarily use \nocite{*} to print all citations.

P.S. or may be you are using \ref{} instead of \cite{} ;)

Actual Reason for this error is... I found that there are two things that I found are necessary to make the IEEEtran class compile:

1. There needs to be a at least one correct citation in your document one in your bib (in your case, bibi.bib) file.
2. In the tool chain, you need to compile with LaTeX (or equivalently PdfLaTeX) twice, then once with BibTex, and then with LaTeX again to incorporate the bibliography.

If either of these two things is not the case, I also get the same LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item error. Bizarrely, with a single citation it works for me, but after commenting it out it crashes again.

The apparent reason for this is that the IEEEtran class doesn't like empty bibliographies and can't deal with that. I haven't been able to find an underlying reason for that, though, nor a way to fix it.