Bibliography

Chicago style citation

Chicago offers two citation systems. Here’s how to tell which you need and how each one works, following The Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed.).

Cite it now

Smart detection works out the source type from what you paste.

Source details
Source type
Authors (or an organisation)
Publication date (leave blank if none)

Bibliography entry · Chicago notes & bibliography

Your citation appears here as you type, set exactly as it will look in your paper.

Footnotes

Fill in the author and date to see the in-text version.

Notes-bibliography

A superscript number in your text points to a footnote at the bottom of the page (or an endnote). The first note for a source is full; later notes are shortened. A bibliography at the end lists every source alphabetically.

People rely on two systems of thought: one fast and intuitive, one slow and deliberate.1

Students who took notes by hand remembered concepts better than laptop users.2

Fast thinking is also where most cognitive biases come from.3

1. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 20.

Step 1 of 4. The first time you cite a source, the footnote gives the full details: author’s name in normal order, title, publication facts in brackets, and the page you used.

Author-date

Works like APA: (Surname Year, page) in the text, a reference list at the end, and the year straight after the author. Note the Chicago details: no comma between name and year, and page numbers without “p.”.

Chicago author-date

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.

In-text: (Kimmerer 2013, 45) or Kimmerer (2013, 45)

What about “Ibid.”?

Ibid. (“in the same place”) was used for a note citing the same source as the note before. The 17th edition discouraged it and the 18th prefers a short note instead, which stays correct when notes get moved around. Some instructors still accept it.

Questions students ask

Footnotes or endnotes?

Either is acceptable in Chicago; footnotes are more common in student papers. Follow your instructor.

Does Chicago use a title page?

Chicago itself has no fixed rule, but most instructors (and the Turabian student guide) expect a title page with the title centred about a third of the way down, and your name, course and date lower down.