In the above example of an article citation, we can make out the names of the authors, the year of publication, the title of the article and the name of the journal. There are many different styles of bibliographic citations: the above are generic examples.

In the above example of an article citation, there are parts of the citation that may be difficult to understand: we have the puzzling numbers "31 (1) 47-52." If you think about the physical nature of a periodical article, you know that they tend to occupy a range of pages, and what better way to express that range of pages by using a range of numbers (such as 47-52)? But what about the "31 (1)"? In general, a bibliographic citation for an article goes from unit: subunit. In this case, the "unit" in question is a volume number (31) and the (1) is the issue number.

You can see that the article citation has a level of complexity not present in the book citation.  Whenever you have two titles (one for the article, and one for the journal) and a range of numbers (representing a distinct range of pages), we have a citation specifying a subunit (the article) within a larger unit (a journal), you probably have a citation to an article.¹

If you have difficulty in deciphering a citation, email it to us for help.

You can often get useful citations from the bibliographies (also called "References" or "Literature Cited") at the end of scholarly articles. You can also get them from searching in databases (see "How to find Articles" ). 

_________________________ 1It could also be a chapter in a book, but that is far less common.
Links:
Sourceaid's Citation Builder Bibliographic Citations Journal and Article Types

James S. Koga
jskoga@csupomona.edu
September 16, 2008