I have noticed in some citations that the journal or conference name is split up, for example "Neat Stuff, International Conference on" instead of "International Conference on Neat Stuff." For example:
Ragsdale, Daniel J., et al. "Adaptation techniques for intrusion detection and intrusion response systems." Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 2000 IEEE International Conference on. Vol. 4. IEEE, 2000.
Is there any reason for writing the reference this way?
There are a virtually unlimited number of conferences whose title is of the form:
"[Society] [International] [Conference|Workshop|Symposium] on XYZ"
where "International" is optional and the optional "Society" is a big organization like IEEE, ACM, ACS, etc.
Since there's basically no information in the first part, the organizers and attendees of these conferences will tend to refer to them as the informative "XYZ", ignoring the preamble. Citations often do the same (e.g., just "XYZ" as venue, and sometimes even just the initials), particularly in page-limited publications such as standard IEEE proceedings.
The "XYZ, IEEE International Conference on" form is then a hybrid compromise that some venues use to put the informative bit up front while still keeping the full title.
