Where to include an article number?

traceyfromkc

I'm working with a ten page article from the journal BMC Cancer. I've loaded the item twice in my Zotero library, once from EBSCOhost and once from PubMed (did this on purpose while helping a student with a different issue, and I don't need to merge the citations at the moment).

When I look at the article in the online journal, it is assigned an article number of 555. However, the citations in the reference list have slightly different information, based on which one I use. The EBSCOhost entry lists the publication information in the citation as "BMC Cancer 23 (1): 1-10.", but the PubMed entry lists the publication information in the citation as "BMC Cancer 23 (1): 555.".

I've looked at several other articles in the journal, and it appears that each article is assigned a specific number, and that the pagination for each article starts at 1, so I'm inclined to go with the way that the EBSCOhost citation is set up, but it might be helpful to keep the specific article number (555) in the citation in some way. Where would be the best place to put that information so it shows up in the reference list? There isn't an Article Number field in the Journal Article citation form.

Thank you for your time!

adamsmith

For most purposes, I think having the article number as pages makes sense. The 1-10 doesn't add any helpful info. You can store 555as
Number: 555
In the Extra field and some styles like APA with different rules for citing article numbers will pick that up

traceyfromkc

For this particular journal, the 1-10 part are the actual pages for that article. I looked at several articles from the same issue of the journal, and the pagination doesn't pick up where the previous article left off, so the article pages start over at 1 every time. That's information that probably should be kept, in case someone is citing information from a specific page in that article.

In the above PubMed example, the article number was listed as the page number, which was incorrect. I'll add the Article Number to the Extra field and see if that helps. Thank you for the suggestion!