I have often had a problem when citing the same author in a document. For example for when two different works by the same author, the name of the author in the second reference will appear as dashes ( ----- ).
The file you would need to edit is the bibliography style file IEEEtran.bst -- or perhaps just pick a different bibliographic style altogether. (I'm afraid I don't know what the required edits would be offhand.) What's wrong with the line of dashes? That's a fairly common bibliographical convention.