Legal Citations – Legal Periodical Citations (McGill Guide, 6.1)

The general form for citing journal articles is as follows:

Author,	Include the author's name as it appears on the article, followed by a comma. Do not abbreviate.
"Title of Article”	Indicate the title of the article in quotation marks.
(Year of Publication) or [Year of Publication]	If the journal is published and organized by volume numbers, then place the year of publication in parentheses. If, on the other hand, the journal is not organized by volume numbers, then place the year of publication in brackets. Brackets indicate that the journal is organized by year.
Volume	The volume number of the journal follows the year of publication. For journals that publish non-consecutively paginated issues of a volume, place the issue number after the volume number and separate the two with a colon.
:	If an issue number is provided, seperate the volume and issue by a semicolon.
Issue	Whenever an issue number is provided, add it after the volume, separated by a semicolon.
Title of Journal	The title of the journal should be abbreviated (if an abbeviation can be found).
First Page of Article	Indicate the journal page where the article begins, followed by a period, unless pinpointing to a particular passage. Do not write the page range.
Pinpoint	If referring to a specific passage, then indicate the chapter (c), paragraph (¶ or para), footnote (n), or page number at which it is found. A pinpoint should always be preceded by "at” and followed by a period, unless you are including electronic service information.
(Electronic Service/Database).	If applicable, indicate the electronic service used to locate the article in parentheses. Note, however, that it is always preferable to cite a journal article to a printed source.

EXAMPLE:

Author,	"Article Title”	(Year of Publication)	Volume	:	Issue	Journal Title	First Page of Article.
Margaret Thornton & Joanne Bagust,	""The Gender Trap: Flexible Work in Corporate Legal Practice"”	(2007)	45	:	4	Osgoode Hall LJ	773.

Margaret Thornton & Joanne Bagust, "The gender trap: flexible work in corporate legal practice” (2007) 45:4 Osgood Law LJ 773 at p 775.

As a footnote, this journal article would appear as follows:

EXAMPLE: Historically, women could recover nothing for their personal injuries; in fact the claim that did exist was one for her husband's loss of services (action per quod servitium amisit). Matters only changed under the reforms brought about by the married women's property law reform starting in the late 1800's.³¹ …

³¹ Margaret Thornton & Joanne Bagust, "The gender trap: flexible work in corporate legal practice” (2007) 45:4 Osgoode Hall LJ 773 at p 775 [Thornton & Bagust, "The Gender Gap”].

Notice how the author has established a short-form for this citation. Since he plans on including subsequent references to this article, establishing a short-form will save him time in doing so, and it will ensure that his footnotes section is as streamlined as possible!

³² …
³⁴ …
³⁵ Thornton & Bagust, "The Gender Gap”, supra note 31 at 775.

Every subsequent reference to the "The Gender Gap” article can be cited using the established short-form. However, be sure to cite to the original note using supra ("above”) and, if necessary, indicate what page is being cited to in this particular footnote.

(Taken from Jeff Berryman, "Accommodating ethnic and cultural factors in damages for personal injury” (2007) 40 UBC L Rev 1. Note that the second footnote here is not contained in the original text of the article, having been added for illustrative purposes only.)

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Last Updated: 2014-09-10