Understanding articles

Each issue of a journal contains a number of articles written by academic or journalists.

Below are some of the articles listed in volume 31, issue 10 of The British Journal of Nursing.

‘A question of nuance’ by T. Bourne, p. 522.
‘Debating the best way to compensate patients for clinical negligence’ by J. Tingle, pp. 524–525.
‘Inequalities in cancer screening, prevention and service engagement between UK ethnic minority groups’ by S. Abraham et al., pp. S14–S24.
'Young and early career cancer nurses: sustaining the future of cancer nursing’ by C. Rowell, B. Maynard and J. Ewang, pp. S41–S43.

Below is a full reference to one of those articles. Mouse over the text below to see the different components of a journal article reference.

Abraham, S. et al. (2022) ‘Inequalities in cancer screening, prevention and service engagement between UK ethnic minority groups’, British Journal of Nursing, 31(10), pp.S14–S24.

The authors who wrote the article. The year the article was published. The title of the article. The journal that the article was published in. The volume and issue number of the journal. These tell which part of the journal includes the article. The page range of the journal article. This article was published in the supplement.

If you are asked to find a specific journal article the easiest way is to copy and paste the article title into Library Search.

If you don't find the article this way, you can use Library Search to search for the journal it is published in. You can then either search for the article title within the journal, or navigate to the year, volume, issue and page number. Remember you will need all this information to reference your article in your assignment.

We purchase our journals as part of a collection or database. This is useful because:

you can search across thousands of articles from many journals at the same time
you can search for articles on a specific subject or topic.

The British Journal of Nursing can be found in the CINAHL database. You can find out about databases from the understanding databases page.

Try it for yourself

Find a journal on Library Search and browse through the back issues and look at one or two articles that interest you. If you can't think of a journal, you could try one of the following: