Known Journal Articles: Journal Citation and Abbreviations
Research Skill Development includes learning to find journal articles as well as books for assignments and general reading.
In this section you will learn how to:
identify citations to journal articles
find full journal titles from their abbreviations
Journal article citation
One of the citations in the bibliography shown earlier referred to a journal article
You can identify a journal article citation by:
the presence of volume number, issue number, and pagination
the absence of the name of the publisher or the place of publication
There may be variations in the citation style:
the title of the article may be omitted (usually in the bibliographies of older journal articles or books)
the journal title may be abbreviated
the volume number may be in bold or underlined
the issue number may be omitted
Journals (also called periodicals, serials or magazines) are publications like Scientific American, Physiological reviews, or Brain which:
- are published frequently e.g. Scientific American is published monthly; Physiological reviews is published quarterly
- contain articles by different authors
- usually cover a particular subject area such as public health, or orthodontics or rheumatology
- usually have full text versions available online in recent issues.
Journal Title Abbreviations
Journal titles are sometimes abbreviated in citations e.g. Sci Am rather than Scientific American. When searching for journal articles in Library Search you sometimes need the full journal title not an abbreviation.
If necessary you can find full journal titles in
Alkire, L. Periodical title abbreviations: By Abbreviation (vol. 1),
This is kept at the Research Help Desk.
Right click on the link to open NLM Catalog: Journals referenced in the NCBI Databases This is a list of the journals held by the National Library of Medicine in the USA. In this resource you can find the full title of many abbreviations of biomedical and life science journals.
Type/paste in the abbreviated journal title
Asia Pac J Clin Nutr
Usually the full title will appear before you have finished typing.
You can click on the full title when it appears and then on Search to find more details if you wish.
Leave this new window (tab) for the NLM (US National Library of Medicine) open until after you have finished the next question in MyUni, then close.
When you cite a journal article in an assignment it's usually best to use the full title of the journal, not an abbreviation.
If you are required to use the Uni of Adelaide Harvard citation style then the full journal title for every article you cite is obligatory.
 You should now know how to:
Go to the next section Journal Title Search.
Back to the previous section of the tutorial Using Search Results
Back to the tutorial Table of Contents
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