Anatomy of a Journal Citation
A citation is the information that is used to help people to locate an article. Various style guides
call for slightly different citation layouts, but the following basic elements are always there:
1. Authors.
Some articles only have one author and others have several. You may see multiple authors listed
in a citation or you might see the Latin abbreviation et al. which means "and others." This usually
means that five or more people contributed to the final product.
2. Year.
The year listed in a citation is the year in which the article was published.
3. Article Title.
The title of the article is usually descriptive and gives the reader some idea of what subject area
the article covers.
4. Journal Title.
The journal (or periodical or source) title is the name of the publication in which the article
appeared. You may see journal titles written out in full or abbreviated, as in the example above.
The abbreviation Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. refers to the publication Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.*If you encounter an abbreviated
journal title and you can't figure out what the full title is, you can usually find the full title by copying and
pasting the abbreviation into Google.
5. Volume, Issue and Page Numbers.
The example above shows only the volume number and page numbers.
• The volume number, 97 in the above example, refers to the editions of the journal
published in a particular year.
• The issue number, absent from the above citation, is often presented in parentheses
immediately following the volume number. For example, 26(8) would refer to the 8th
issue of the 26th volume.
• The page numbers are simply the numbers on the pages. The above article is found on
pages 8151-8156