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In this example, we're going to show how to build up the OSCOLA citation for a journal article from various elements that you would find while searching for it in an online database. In this example, we use Westlaw.
So let's imagine that we've been doing some research into counter-terrorism and we'd found a particular article to which we wanted to draw a reference in our work. So this article here we'll use by way of example, ‘Counter-terrorism and counter-extremism: the UK policy spirals’. We have the makings of a citation here on the Westlaw screen, which we have: P.L. 2018 Oct 7252747. That's not going to be enough to build the reference up that we need. We're also going to need to know from Westlaw the title of the article, fairly obviously. So we now also know that we have ‘Counter-terrorism and counter-extremism: the policy spirals’ and we also need the name of the author, which we can see from the full text of the article is Clive Walker.
So here's a summary of the bits that we've gained from Westlaw: we've got PL 2018. (Public Law, PLC stands for, that's the name of the journal in which the article was published); October, it's the October edition of Public Law for 2018; 725 being the start page of the article, 747 being the last page. We've got the title, we've got the author, so how do we turn that information into an OSCOLA reference? Well, we start with the name of the author, so, Clive Walker. We then follow it with the title, the name of the article itself. There's a comma goes between the author's name and the title of the article and the title is put in single inverted commas, and in regular font; the name of the article is not italicized, unlike the title of a book is within OSCOLA. The next thing we want is the year of publication, so 2018. Here it's in square brackets because Public Law is not a journal that has a consecutive volume numbering, so 2018 is enough to identify this particular edition. Then we have an abbreviation for the journal name itself, so P.L., which we had from Westlaw but OSCOLA requires us to take out the full stops. OSCOLA doesn't really like that much punctuation. And to complete the citation all we need is the start page of the article, so 725. We don't need to put in the whole page range as far as OSCOLA is concerned. So that's the complete reference for it. If we then wanted to move on in our work, if we’d cited a passage from a particular page in the article, let's say page 731, we can simply add that to our pinpoint reference at the end by putting a comma and then the page to which we are referring. So the last bit there shows a pinpoint reference to page 731 of Clive Walker's article in Public Law.