Journal articles (also referred to as scholarly articles, peer-reviewed articles, refereed articles, and academic research articles) are ways that researchers share their work with the wider scholarly community. After they do their research and write their article, the researchers (authors) submit their articles to journals that publish research in their field/discipline. Often, this is a long process (known as peer-review), and a lot of changes can be made or time can pass between the initial research and when it’s actually published in a journal. You will be asked to support your own research with research that has come before it—usually in the form of research articles.

In your research, you will likely access most (if not all) of your journal articles electronically. Most the library’s journal subscriptions are for digitized access to academic journals. Many of the journals themselves, though, come out as a print publication. This is why you sometimes see page numbers on the PDFs of journals articles—they originally existed in print. It’s not practical for the library to subscribe to most journals in print. For one thing, we don’t have enough space in the building. But more importantly, it’s easier for most people to be able to access the journal articles online, from anywhere (rather than having to come to campus).

It’s important to understand that journal articles are printed in journals—and to be able to distinguish between the article title and the journal title. At the very least, you need this information for your citation. But it also gives you a better understanding of where the article was published from a discipline perspective. It’s also helpful information for those who are reading your research and may want to look up the source you used. The article title and the author names give them a starting point. The journal title (plus the volume and issue number—which serve as publication date indicators—and the year) make it easier to find through the library’s journal subscriptions.

Optional Video Tutorial: Peer Review in 3 Minutes

Below is a screenshot of a typical landing page for a journal article found using Auraria Library’s resources. The different elements of the citation are all available—if you know where to look for them. They can be in different places depending on the publisher, but you should always be able to identify the name of the journal where the article was published (plus any associated volume/issue numbers), the year it was published, the title of the article, and the names of the authors. You may also sometimes find a DOI (document object identifier) that may either be a number or a URL. You can think of the DOI as the article’s “permanent address.”

Elements of citations highlighted on a journal article record page

To practice, look at the screenshot and see if you can construct a properly formatted citation from the elements that are identified.