How to Cite a Journal Article (APA, MLA, AMA, Vancouver & IEEE)

Journal articles are the sources you will cite most often in academic writing, and they are also the easiest to get right — because almost every article carries a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) that unlocks its full metadata. This guide shows you exactly what a journal citation needs, how it looks in the five most-requested styles, and how to generate one in seconds.

What information a journal citation needs

Every journal article reference is built from the same handful of parts:

• Author(s) — last name and initials, in the order they appear on the paper
• Year of publication
• Article title
• Journal name (often italicised, sometimes abbreviated)
• Volume and issue number
• Page range (or article number)
• DOI — the permanent link to the article

If you have the DOI, you have everything. Paste it into the free citation generator and the author list, journal, volume, and pages are filled in for you from Crossref — no retyping.

The same article in five styles

Here is one article — Wang et al., published in JAMA in 2020 — formatted in each major style so you can see the differences at a glance.

APA (7th edition) — author–date:

Wang, D., Hu, B., Hu, C., et al. (2020). Clinical characteristics of 138 hospitalized patients with 2019 novel coronavirus–infected pneumonia in Wuhan, China. JAMA, 323(11), 1061–1069. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.1585

MLA (9th edition) — author–page:

Wang, Dawei, et al. "Clinical Characteristics of 138 Hospitalized Patients with 2019 Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia in Wuhan, China." JAMA, vol. 323, no. 11, 2020, pp. 1061–69.

AMA (11th edition) — numbered:

1. Wang D, Hu B, Hu C, et al. Clinical characteristics of 138 hospitalized patients with 2019 novel coronavirus–infected pneumonia in Wuhan, China. JAMA. 2020;323(11):1061-1069.

Vancouver — numbered, for biomedical journals:

1. Wang D, Hu B, Hu C, et al. Clinical characteristics of 138 hospitalized patients with 2019 novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia in Wuhan, China. JAMA. 2020;323(11):1061-9.

IEEE — bracketed numbers:

[1] D. Wang et al., "Clinical characteristics of 138 hospitalized patients with 2019 novel coronavirus–infected pneumonia in Wuhan, China," JAMA, vol. 323, no. 11, pp. 1061–1069, 2020.

Notice how author-name formatting, the position of the year, and journal abbreviation all change between styles. Getting these details right by hand is where most citation errors creep in.

Do it automatically

1. Open the style you need — for example the APA, AMA, Vancouver, or IEEE generator.
2. Paste the article's DOI (it looks like 10.1001/jama.2020.1585) or its PubMed ID.
3. Copy the finished reference and in-text citation, or export your whole list to Word, BibTeX, or RIS.

Because NeatCite runs on the same open CSL / citeproc engine that Zotero and Mendeley use, the output follows the official rules of each style — so you can trust it for coursework and manuscripts alike.

Frequently asked questions

What if the article has no DOI? Older articles may not have one. Search for the article by its PubMed ID instead, or use manual entry to type in the title, authors, journal, and pages.

How many authors before "et al."? It depends on the style. AMA lists up to six then adds "et al."; APA lists up to 20; MLA uses "et al." after the first author when there are three or more. The generator applies the correct rule automatically.

Do I italicise the journal or the article title? In most styles the journal name is italicised and the article title is in plain text or quotation marks — but this flips in some styles. Let the generator handle it.