Article Citation

Article Citation  

Here is an example of a citation to an article:

The basic elements of a citation are:  author, date, title of article, title of journal or periodical, volume, issue and pages.
 
The author of the article is who wrote the article, and can be a single person or many people.  It can even be a corporate author where an article is credited to a company or a government agency.  For this article, the author is J. Sabia.
 
The date is when the article was published.  It can be just the year, the month and year or the entire date, depending on the citation style used and the information available. In this example, the citation style only requires the year, which is 2014.
 
The title of the article is fairly clear, but people often confuse it with the title of the journal.  In this article, the title of the article is The Effect of Minimum Wages over the Business Cycle. 
 
For the title of the journal, in this case it is Journal of Labor Research.  Notice that in this citation style the title of the journal is in italics in order to differentiate it from the title of the article. 
 
Another point of confusion is that a journal can be called several different things including:  magazine, journal, serial or periodical.  The main point to remember is that it is a source of information that is published on a regular basis that contains articles on a specified area of interest.
 
Since a journal (magazine, serial or periodical) is published on a regular basis, volume and issues are used to make it easier to identify where to find a particular article.  A volume is made up of a number of issues.  For example, a journal could be published quarterly with the volume being made up by the four issues for the year.  The Journal of Labor Research is such a journal, so the 35(3) in the citation indicates that this article was published in the 35^th year of the journal and that this article is the third issue that had been published in that year.
 
The last element, the pages 227-245 gives you where to look in the issue once you retrieve it.