Understanding articles

Each issue of a journal contains a number of articles written by academics. Below are some of the articles listed in one of the issues of The British Journal of Nursing.

British Journal of Nursing, Vol. 27, Issue 3, 2018

Pete, I. 'Help for men with cancer', p. 115
Smith, J. and Rushton, M. 'Improving student nurses' confidence in managing the acutely ill patient', pp. 124-129.
Abel, N. and Embrey, N. 'Multiple sclerosis: dealing with complex treatment decisions', pp. 132-136.
Gammon, J. and Hunt, J. 'A review of isolation practices and procedures in healthcare settings', pp. 137-140.

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 search for the article title within the journal or you can navigate to the year, volume, issue and page number if you have all these details. You will need all this information to reference your articles in the bibliography of your assignment.

Mouse over the text below to see the different components of a journal article reference.

Smith, J. and Rushton, M. (2018) ‘Improving student nurses’ confidence in managing the acutely ill patient’, British Journal of Nursing, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 124-129.

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

Although you can read our journals individually we buy them as part of a collection or database. This is useful for you 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. There is more about databases in the next section.

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 try New Scientist or Museum International or World Englishes or Political Studies.

You can find out about databases from the understanding databases page.