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Most databases provide a citation tool,
but it’s still useful to know how to create an article citation from scratch.
We’ll use Purdue Owl’s MLA 2009 Formatting and Style Guide.
In this example we will cite a magazine article.
A magazine article citation will be slightly different than a journal or newspaper article citation,
so consult a guide to look at these differences.
To cite a database article, we’ll simply cite it like a print article and then add information to indicate where and when we found it online.
Many of the rules that we used when creating a book citation will be the same
including how the authors are listed, how things are capitalized, and punctuation.
All the information we will need to create this citation can be found in the database record,
like this one from Academic Search Complete.
Like a book citation we’ll type the author:
Last Name - Comma - First Name - Period
If there are multiple authors, we’ll follow the same rules that we would for a book.
Now we’ll type the article title.
Instead of italics, the article title will be in quotes.
A period is at the end of the title before the closing quotation mark.
In MLA quotation marks are used to indicate shorter works
like chapters within a book or articles within a magazine.
Italics indicate longer works,
which is why the magazine’s title will be in italics.
We’ll type this next with no punctuation after it.
We then include the date of publication with the day followed by the abbreviated month and then the year.
The year is followed by a colon.
Now, if an article does not have a specific date or is published monthly,
simply include the abbreviated month followed by the year
or just the year.
After the colon we'll type the page range for this article.
If the article is only on one page, we’ll simply put that page number.
Now, if we typed
Print - Period
we would have a finished citation for a print magazine article.
Since it’s a database article,
we’ll add some information to show where and when we found it.
We will type the database’s name in italics followed by a period.
For online resources we’ll include the format
Web - Period
Finally, we’ll type the date of access or when we found the article following the same rules mentioned previously,
We include this date of access, because online sources frequently change.
It’s important for the reader to know when we found the source.
In the next tutorial we’ll cover creating citations for websites and web pages.