What is the correct form of conferences/proceedings/transactions name in a citation?
I suspect that the reason citations are done this way (and now we're verging on english.se territory) is to allow for meaningful alphabetical ordering/indexing. 

In this case, the "IEEE transactions on" is the generic part of the name, and should not be used for alphabetical ordering/indexing. This is analogous to how in indices you'll often see things like 


  Korea, Republic of


rather than


  Republic of Korea.