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Referencing journal articles

A reference to a journal article will look like this:

Author(s) (Year) Article title. Journal Title Volume(Issue), Page numbers.

Examples of references

Foreman, J. L. and Gubbins, E. J. (2015) Teachers see what ability scores cannot: predicting student performance with challenging mathematics. Journal of advanced academics 26(1), 5-23.

Johnes, M. (2008) A prince, a king, and a referendum: rugby, politics, and nationhood in Wales, 1969–1979. Journal of British studies 47, 129-148.

Examples of citing in the text of your work: Foreman and Gubbins (2015) or (Foreman and Gubbins 2015).

See the section on Citing within the text of written work for a complete guide to doing your citations.

If you find it difficult to work out what bits of information are the author’s names, article title and journal title, you can email your subject librarian with the information you have and ask how to tell what to use where.

Here are the full rules about each piece of information:

  1. Author(s) of the article. Use family name, followed by initial(s).
  2. Year of publication (in round brackets).
  3. Title of the article.
  4. Title of the journal, which must be in italics
  5. Volume and issue number (issue number in brackets).
  6. First and last page numbers of the article (separated by a dash -).

Notes:

  • You may see an "issue" called a 'part' or 'number' instead; it may be shown with a number, a month name, or a letter. All of those are ways of showing which bit of the volume you are looking at. For example, you may see "Volume 5, issue 6"; "Volume 5, number 6", or  "Volume 5, part 6". All these mean the same thing and should be referenced as 5(6). If you see "Volume 5, June issue" you reference it as 5(June). "Volume 5, supplement VI" is referenced as 5(supp VI).
  • You can usually find the issue number and volume on the front cover of a physical journal, or towards the top of a PDF of an online journal article.
  • Some journals have strange-looking page numbers such as "e240-249". Include these in your reference as the journal gives them.
  • If you cannot find an author for a journal article (for instance in an editorial), you can either use the name of the journal as the author or cite it as "Anonymous".

EndNote reference type - use Journal Article

Electronic journal articles

Usually you ignore the web address and give the reference as you would for a printed journal article.

You should only use this electronic journal article format when the journal:

  • Has no volume, issue and page numbers, or
  • Is not available as a print version at all (or you’re not sure)

or when the article is "forthcoming”, “in press” or “online ahead of print”, so that it is available electronically but has not yet been given a place in a print issue and assigned page numbers. In that case you put “Epub ahead of print” where the volume, issue and page numbers normally go.

A reference to an electronic journal article will look like this:

Author(s) (Year) Article title. Journal title. Volume(Issue), Page numbers. Web address/DOI and date accessed.

Some ejournals assign a single “page number” to each article within the journal, even though each individual article is many pages long. If you find an article that is more than one page long but the journal’s information about it only gives it one page number:

Use the page number that the journal gives you, but add the number of pages that the article really has in square brackets so that you can cite individual pages inside the article if you need to. It will look like this “19(6), 5 [10 pages].”

Examples of references

Day, L., Fildes, B., Gordon, I., Fitzharris, M., Flamer, H. and Lord, S. (2002) Randomised factorial trial of falls prevention among older people living in their own homes. BMJ 325(7356), 128 [6 pages].  https://www.bmj.com/content/325/7356/128 Accessed 9 September 2019.

License, S., Smith, R., McGuigan M.P. and Earnest, C.P. (2015) Gait pattern alterations during walking, texting and walking and texting during cognitively distractive tasks while negotiating common pedestrian obstacles. PLOS one0133281 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133281 Accessed 12 August 2015.

Sacchi, M., Serafino, M., Villani, E., Tagliabue, E., Luccarelli, S., Bonsignore, F. and Nucci, P. (2019) Efficacy of atropine 0.01% for the treatment of childhood myopia in European patients. Acta ophthalmologica Epub ahead of print https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aos.14166 Accessed 20 August 2019. 

Examples of citing in the text of your work: Heyden et al. (2018) or (Heyden et al. 2018).

See the section on Citing within the text of written work for a complete guide to doing your citations.

Here are the full rules about each piece of information:

  1. Author(s) of the article. Use family name, followed by initial(s).
  2. Year of publication (in round brackets).
  3. Title of the article.
  4. Title of the journal, which must be in italics.
  5. Volume number and issue number, if available (issue number in brackets).
  6. First and last page numbers of the article, if available (separated by a dash -).
  7. Web address, or doi if available
  8. "Accessed" followed by the date you looked at the article.

EndNote reference type - use Electronic Journal Article. You may have to change the type in EndNote from Journal article. Ensure that the Access Date is entered in the Date Accessed field

Sections of journal articles

For appendices or forewords written by different authors to the main body of the article.

A reference to a portion of a journal article will look like this:

Author(s) (Year) Title of this author’s contribution, Page numbers of the part of the article in Author(s) of article. Article title. Journal title Volume (Issue), Page numbers of article.

Example of reference

Bond, J. and Worley, F. (2004) Cremated animal bone, 79-81 in Richards, J.D. Excavations at the Viking barrow cemetery at Heath Wood, Ingleby, Derbyshire. Antiquarians journal 84, 23-116.

Example of citing in the text of your work: Bond and Worley (2004) or (Bond and Worley 2004).

See the section on Citing within the text of written work for a complete guide to doing your citations.

Here are the full rules about each piece of information:

  1. Author(s) of the part you are using. Use family name, followed by initial(s).
  2. Year of publication (in round brackets).
  3. Title of this author’s contribution to the article,
  4. First and last page numbers of this author’s contribution to the article.
  5. The word “in”
  6. Author(s) of the article. Use family name, followed by initial(s).
  7. Title of the article.
  8. Title of the journal, which must be in italics
  9. The volume and issue number (issue number in brackets).
  10. First and last page numbers of the article (separated by a dash -).

EndNote reference type - use Journal Article

EndNote cannot create a correct article section reference - you will need to edit the reference manually (see Manually updating Endnote citations or references) We suggest using the section authors as the authors’ names in the EndNote record (as this is what you need the citation to be) but otherwise to use the details of the whole article, then edit the Word document to add the section title, the section page numbers, and the article authors’ names.