How to find issue number of an article?

You can usually find the issue number and volume on the front cover of a physical journal, or towards the top of a PDF of an online journal article. Some journals have strange-looking page numbers such as "e240-249". Include these in your reference as the journal gives them.

A reference to a journal article will look like this:

Author(s) (Year) Article title. Journal Title Volume(Issue), Page numbers.

Examples of references

Foreman, J. L. and Gubbins, E. J. (2015) Teachers see what ability scores cannot: predicting student performance with challenging mathematics. Journal of advanced academics 26(1), 5-23.

Johnes, M. (2008) A prince, a king, and a referendum: rugby, politics, and nationhood in Wales, 1969–1979. Journal of British studies 47, 129-148.

Examples of citing in the text of your work: Foreman and Gubbins (2015) or (Foreman and Gubbins 2015).

If you find it difficult to work out what bits of information are the author’s names, article title and journal title, you can email your subject librarian with the information you have and ask how to tell what to use where.

Here are the full rules about each piece of information:

Notes:

Academic journal articles' citations differ from book sources, and thus require you to identify a few unique pieces of information.

Title - Full title and subtitles

Author(s) - may include one or more authors of the article

Page Number - cite the entire page range in which the article appears

Publication - name of the journal the article was published in

Volume / Issue Number - identifies the exact edition of the journal where the article appears

APA Style (7th ed.)

When creating a reference to a periodical, such as a journal article, volume and issue numbers are standard elements. The difference between the numbers is that "volume typically refers to the number of years the publication has been circulated, and issue refers to how many times that periodical has been published during that year" (Wikipedia, n.d., para. 2).

Volume numbers in references should be italicized (American Psychological Association [APA], 2020, p. 294), but "do not italicize the issue number, the parentheses, or the comma after the issue number" (APA, 2020, p. 294).

In the reference below, the volume number is 49 and the issue number is 4:

Godfrey, D. (2005). Adapting historical citations to APA Style. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 49(4), 544-547. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4904_15

If a resource doesn't have a volume or issue number, omit that information from the reference (APA, 2020, p. 294).

Reference