Chicago Guide (17th Edition)

Chicago style provides guidelines for formatting papers and citing sources in academic writing.

Below is a list of resources to help you cite your sources in Chicago style.

Chicago style provides two different styles for citation: the Notes-Bibliography (NB) style, the preferred format for papers written in the humanities, and the Author-Date style. 

In the Notes-Bibliography style, you indicate that you have quoted, paraphrased, or referred to a source by adding a superscript number at the end of the sentence and a corresponding footnote at the bottom of the page to indicate source information.

In addition to citing in the text of your paper through a footnote, you need to provide a bibliography, which is an alphabetical list of all the sources used in your paper on a separate page at the end of your paper. 

You can insert footnotes automatically in Word or Google Docs. If you have more than one footnote on a page, put a blank line between notes.

There are two types of footnote in Chicago style: Full notes and shortened notes. Typically, you should provide the full source information the first time you cite it, then shorten subsequent citations of the source to prevent repetition.

• The first citation of each source should be a full note. Full notes contain the full publication details of the source, including author/create name(s), title information, publication information, date, page(s) cited, and URL or DOI where applicable. Details of full notes depend on the source type. 
• Shortened notes for a source typically consist of the author(s)’s last name(s), the title of the work (usually shortened if more than four words), and the page number(s).

Please see examples from the Sample Citations on the Chicago Style website.

The bibliography provides an alphabetical list of all sources cited at the end of your paper. The list of bibliography entries starts on a new page titled Bibliography. Unlike the main body text of a Chicago format paper, the bibliography is not double-spaced. The Bibliography follows the format below:

• Include a 1-inch (2.54 cm) margin.
• Center the title, Bibliography, at the top of the page. 
• Leave two blank lines between the title and first entry.
• The first line of each citation is left aligned at the margin. Use a 1/2 inch hanging indent for all of the following lines, except the first line of each source. 
• Single space the entries.
• Leave one blank line between entries.

Bibliography entries are arranged alphabetically by author's last name. Although bibliographic entries for various sources may be formatted differently, they usually include the following elements:

• Author/creator name(s): The first author’s name is inverted in the bibliography, placing the last name first and separating the last name and first name with a comma. List all other authors normally (i.e., First Name Middle Name Last Name). For works with multiple authors, see Sample Citations or MHC Library Guide for Chicago Style. 
• Title information: Titles may be in italics or placed in quotation marks (i.e., Titles of books and journals are italicized. Titles of articles, chapters, poems, etc. are placed in quotation marks).
• Publication information: Publisher name, place of publication, year of publication for a book; volume, issue number, and year of publication for a journal article; Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or URL for an online resource, preferably a DOI.

More information can be found from the Sample Citations on Chicago Style website.