How to Cite a Journal Article in APA, MLA, Chicago, and Four More Styles

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Published April 22, 2026

A peer-reviewed journal article is the closest thing academic writing has to a primary source, and it is also the source type where citation rigor matters most. Editors, graders, and replication-checking readers will scan your reference list looking for journal articles first — checking volume, issue, page range, and DOI against what they remember. A flawed entry on a key citation can quietly cost you marks even when the rest of the bibliography is fine. This guide shows the format for a standard peer-reviewed article in each of the seven styles, with the same article formatted side by side, and the rules for the cases that come up most often in practice — DOIs, preprints, retractions, online-only journals, and articles too old to have a digital identifier.

The shortest answer: get the author list, the article title, the journal title, the volume and issue, the page range, the year, and the DOI. Plug those eight fields into your style’s format. The DOI is the field that does the most work — it makes the article findable for the next century regardless of where it moves.

What counts as a “journal article”

A journal article, for citation purposes, is a single piece of writing published in an issue of a periodical that uses some form of editorial review — typically peer review, sometimes editorial review, occasionally invited review. The category includes:

• Standard research articles in peer-reviewed journals — the modal case.
• Review articles that synthesize a field of work.
• Editorials, commentaries, and letters in journals — usually cite the same way as research articles, sometimes with a label like [Editorial] or [Letter] in styles that require it.
• Book reviews in journals — cite as a review with the book under review noted.
• Conference papers published in a journal issue — cite as a journal article using the issue’s metadata.

Things that aren’t journal articles for citation purposes, even when they look like them:

• A magazine article — The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, Scientific American — cites differently from a peer-reviewed paper. The format is closer to a website or a print magazine, not a journal.
• A conference paper in conference proceedings is its own source type in most styles.
• A technical report or working paper that hasn’t gone through journal review cites as a report, not a journal article.
• A preprint is its own category — see the variation section below.

If your source is a peer-reviewed paper in a journal with a volume and issue number, this page applies.

Information to collect before you cite

Open the article PDF or the journal’s article page and copy these eight fields:

• Authors — full name in publication order, as listed on the article (not on a author bio page).
• Article title — exactly as published.
• Journal title — full title for APA/MLA/Chicago/Harvard; NLM abbreviation for Vancouver/AMA/IEEE.
• Year of publication — the year of the issue, not the year of preprint posting or the year of advance-online release.
• Volume number
• Issue number — when the journal uses issues. Some journals number continuously and skip the issue field.
• Page range — first page to last page, even if cited content only spans a few pages. The in-text citation pinpoints the specific page.
• DOI — the digital object identifier from the article’s landing page. If no DOI exists, capture the stable URL on the journal’s site instead.

The generator at / on this site captures most of these fields from a DOI or PubMed ID. As always, verify the result against the article’s actual landing page — a stale issue number or wrong page range is the most common error in machine-extracted citations.

The same article, formatted in all seven styles

The source: Aaron Goldstein, Priya Ramanathan, and Liam O’Connor. “Sleep Consolidation Effects on Procedural Learning in Adolescents.” Journal of Cognitive Development, volume 19, issue 2 (2024), pages 87–104. DOI: 10.1037/cogdev0000412.

The structural pattern is the same in every style — authors, title, journal, year, volume, issue, pages, DOI — and the punctuation around each piece is where they diverge. APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard spell out the full journal name and italicize it. Vancouver, AMA, and IEEE use NLM-style abbreviations: Journal of Cognitive Development becomes J Cogn Dev in Vancouver and AMA (plain) and J. Cogn. Dev. in IEEE (italicized, with periods and a space after the volume abbreviation). Article titles in every style are kept in full — IEEE abbreviates journal and conference titles only.

DOI formatting splits the styles cleanly. APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard format the DOI as a clickable URL beginning with https://doi.org/. Vancouver, AMA, and IEEE use the bare DOI with a doi: prefix. Whichever your style, the DOI is mandatory when one exists — it is the only stable identifier the article will keep through journal-name changes, server moves, and ownership transfers.

The in-text citation for the same source:

• APA: (Goldstein et al., 2024)
• Chicago author–date: (Goldstein et al. 2024) — Chicago drops the comma between author and year
• Harvard (Cite Them Right): (Goldstein, Ramanathan and O’Connor, 2024) — Harvard’s et al. threshold is four or more, so a three-author work spells out every surname
• MLA: (Goldstein et al. 92) — page-specific
• Vancouver, AMA: (3) or superscript ³ in citation order
• IEEE: [3]

When your journal article varies

No DOI. Older articles, regional journals, and some humanities periodicals never received DOIs. Use the article’s stable URL on the journal’s site, with the appropriate access-date treatment for your style.

APA: Smith, J. (1987). The early history of behaviorism. Behavioral Studies, 4(2), 22–38. https://journals.example.org/bs/4-2/22

Advance online publication. When an article has been accepted, copy-edited, and posted online ahead of issue assignment, every style has guidance. Treat the article as published; use “Advance online publication” or the appropriate phrase in place of the volume and issue.

APA: Chen, M. S. (2026). New evidence on attention. Journal of Cognitive Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/cogdev0000999

When the article later receives volume and issue numbers, update your citation to the issue version.

Preprint. Cite the preprint server, not the future journal. Make the preprint nature explicit so the reader sees it has not been peer-reviewed.

APA: Chen, M. S. (2025). New evidence on attention [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/example

MLA: Chen, Margaret S. “New Evidence on Attention.” PsyArXiv, 14 Aug. 2025, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/example. Preprint.

When the published version arrives, switch — but read it first to confirm the conclusions did not change between preprint and publication.

Online-only journal. Cite it like any other journal article. The fact that there is no print edition does not change the format — the journal still has volume, issue (sometimes), and DOI.

Article in another language. Cite in the original language, then provide a translation of the title in square brackets in APA, Vancouver, and AMA. MLA and Chicago use parentheses instead of brackets. The journal title is not translated.

APA: Beauvoir, S. de. (1949). Le deuxième sexe [The second sex]. Les Temps Modernes, 1(1), 1–20.

Article published in a journal supplement. Some journals issue supplemental numbers — a special-issue conference proceedings, an annual review supplement. Include the supplement designator in the volume/issue field: “19 (Suppl. 2)” or “19, S2.”

Edge cases

Retracted article. When an article is retracted, the original article remains in the literature but should never be cited as evidence for the retracted claim. If you must reference it, append the retraction.

APA: Wakefield, A. J., et al. (1998). Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children [Retracted]. The Lancet, 351(9103), 637–641. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(97)11096-0

Cite the retraction notice as a separate reference: The Editors of The Lancet. (2010). Retraction—Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet, 375(9713), 445. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60175-4

Special-issue article. Treat as a normal article. The fact that the issue had a guest editor and a theme is reference-list-irrelevant.

Conference paper later published in a journal issue. Cite the journal version. The conference is part of the article’s history, not its bibliographic identity.

Single-author article. All styles handle this with no special treatment — just one author in the author slot.

Supplemental material. When you cite data, a table, or a video from an article’s supplementary files, the citation is the same as the article itself; in the in-text citation, indicate the supplemental nature: “(Goldstein et al., 2024, Supplementary Figure 3).”

A final principle: the journal article is the citation type your reader is most likely to follow up on, so the citation needs to be findable on the first attempt. A DOI accomplishes this; a copy-pasted URL from your browser’s address bar often does not. Take the extra ten seconds to use the DOI.

Editorial methodology and sources