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Citing Articles from a Journal

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Citations for journal articles, also called "peer-reviewed articles" or "scholarly articles," are different in that you include the volume and issue number for the journal, and the date is put in parenthesis.

How do you know the article you are using is a journal article? Here are some things to look for:

Journal articles usually include a bibliography!
Journal articles are usually lengthy (10+ pages isn't uncommon)
Titles of journal articles are long, descriptive and contain technical wording
Articles may discuss an original experiment and are divided into sections titled methodology, results, discussion, etc.

Citations for journal articles begin with the author and the title of the article, which is the same way that you begin a newspaper or magazine article citation.

Next comes the title of the journal, which is italicized.

Now things start to get tricky! For journal article citations, you need to list the volume and issue number. In this example, the article is found in Volume 80, Issue 3 of the journal Child Development. Note how this is expressed in the citation:

DO NOT put the words "volume" or "issue" in your citation! Follow the example above.

Finally, add the year of publication in parenthesis, the page range where the article is found, and the medium (print):

Here's one more example of a journal article citation. This article lists 20 authors, so you just need to list the first author followed by "et al." This article in The New England Journal of Medicine is from volume 360, issue 17, which is expressed as 360.17 in the citation: