Periodical Articles:
A Guide to Evaluating, Obtaining, 
and Citing Periodical Articles

Once you have found full-text of -- or citations to -- articles on your topic, you will need to do some more work before using these articles in your research papers or other projects. 

For full-text articles, you will need to:

• Evaluate the article's appropriateness for your topic.

  • This may require you to determine whether the article is in a scholarly or popular journal.
    
    

• Format your citation to the article using a recognized citation style (usually APA or MLA).

For citations to articles, you will need to:

• Evaluate the article's appropriateness for your topic.

  • This may require you to determine whether the article is in a scholarly or popular journal.
    
    

• Find out whether the Library owns the journal(s) containing your article(s).

  • If the Library provides access to the journal(s) electronically, you should be able to link to them directly from the citation in the article database.

  • If the Library owns the journal(s) in non-electronic format, locate them in the stacks.

  • If the Library does not provide access to or own the journal(s), request the articles through Interlibrary Loan.
    
    

• Format your citation to the article using a recognized citation style (usually APA or MLA)

Self-Test A Question: Carlos has done a search in an article database and found 13 articles on his topic. He can go home and write his paper now because he is ready to use all 13 of these articles in his paper. True or False?

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Page created by: Kate Manuel.
Last update: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 .