A citation is all the information you need about an article in order to CITE or credit it properly. For a scholarly journal article, this includes the AUTHOR, ARTICLE TITLE, DATE, JOURNAL, VOLUME, ISSUE, and PAGES. You may need additional information depending on the citation style you are using.

One of the first things you want to do is look at the journal citation. The information about the article, such as the journal title, volume, issue, and pages is usually on the first page of the article. You will need this information to cite the article correctly in your paper. Sometimes you can tell that the article is scholarly just by the name of the journal, but not always. Scholarly articles are generally long so looking at the number of pages is one indicator that it is scholarly.

You may also want to find out more about the journal in which the article was published. For example, you may want to know if the article is in a peer-reviewed journal.