The transmitted reference (TR) scheme has gained attention for ultra-wideband (UWB) communications as it bypasses the complex task of channel estimation and provides a simple receiver structure. However, the low-complexity detection in this scheme is achieved at the expense of a loss in performance. To this end, this paper proposes a doublet-shift TR (DsTR) signaling and detection scheme to improve the performance of conventional TR impulse radio UWB system. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with conventional TR signaling scheme in terms of uncoded bit error rate (BER). The simulation results validate that the doublet-shift TR scheme achieves about 1.5-2 dB better performance than the conventional TR scheme. The DsTR scheme does not require extra energy and still has the low-complexity.