Article in a Journal
MLA:
Masri, Heather A. “Carnival Laugher in the Pardoner’s Tale.” Medieval
[author of article.] [“title of article.”]
Perspectives X (1995): 148-156.
[title of journal.] [volume number] [(year):] [full page numbers for article.]APA:
Masri, H. A. (1995). Carnival laugher in the pardoner’s tale.
[author of article.][(year).] [title of article, no quotation marks.]
Medieval Perspectives X, pp. 148-156.
[title of journal] [volume number,] [full page numbers for article.]Chicago:
8. Masri, “Carnival Laughter,” 151.
[fn. #.] [author last name, “shortened title,” page quoted.]
[Shortened Chicago reference; see More Notes on Chicago Style for more information.]
Articles can appear in many sources, including books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and websites. Knowing which type you’re using matters both for how you cite the information and for how you use the source to develop your argument.
In the context of research writing, the word “journal” indicates a publication that comes out on a regular schedule (often monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually) with a common publisher or editorial board. Magazines come out on similar schedules, but differ in several key ways from journals. One way to distinguish a journal from a magazine is that journals don’t usually accept color or photographic advertisements.
Many journals are supervised by experts in a given field; some are published by universities or other non-profit organizations that specialize in the topic under discussion. When developing your research, you need to know whether you’re using a scholarly journal or a popular magazine because these two kinds of sources convey very different levels of expertise, depending on the topic. See the discussion of Scholarly vs. Popular Sources for more information. When compiling a Works Cited of list of References, the distinction between journals and magazines matters because there are different conventions for how each should be listed.
The listing for an article in a journal begins with the name of the article’s author and the title of the article. (In APA style, the publication year appears between the author and title.) These are followed by the title of the journal and the volume number. (Most journals keep a running count of their previous publications.) The final two pieces of information are the publication year in parentheses (for MLA & Chicago), and the inclusive page numbers of the article.
Note: Many scholarly journals publish more than one issue per year. By convention, these journals often assign what’s called a “Volume” number to all the issues in a given year: Science Fiction Studies, for instance, published four issues in 2005, but refers to these issues, as a group, as Volume 37. You always include the volume number when listing an article from a scholarly journal; note in the example above that the article comes from Medieval Studies Volume X. But whether or not you also include the “Issue” number depends on how the journal numbers its pages. Some scholarly journals number the first page of every issue with a “1.” This system is referred to as pagination by issue. In other journals, the first issue of the year starts with page “1,” but then the numbers on the second issue pick up where the first issue left off. (So if the last page of issue 1 is “253,” the first page of issue 2 is numbered “254.” This continues with every issue that year, starting again with page “1” in the first issue of the next year.) This system is referred to as continuous pagination. For journals with pagination by issue, you must include both the Volume number and the Issue number in your listing; for journals with continuous pagination, you only need to include the Volume number.
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