The IEEE query format is loosely documented at IEEE Xplore API Portal. In general, anything that works in the website search will also work in getpapers with the --api ieee option enabled.

Note that IEEE does not provide fulltext XML, and their fulltext PDFs are not easily downloadable (though we're working on it). getpapers will output metadata for the search results, and will attempt to reconstruct the fulltext HTML URLs for any papers that have fulltext HTML.

If you want to actually download the fulltext HTML of papers, you will need this hack-around script. In the future we will incorporate fulltext download into getpapers.