Although professors do not often request Chicago Style or format, it still is one of the most used formats at the academic level. This guide will help you understand its rules and differentiate terms; now, let's begin.
Now, before you start writing your essay or assignment, you should keep in mind the following aspects:
General Format
Title Page
A title page isn’t required in Chicago style—often, it’s sufficient to just include your title at the top of the first page—but if you’re asked to include one, Turabian provides guidelines for how to present it.
All text on the title page should be:
If you have a subtitle, the main title ends with a colon, and the subtitle appears on the following line, also in bold and the same size as the main title.
About ⅔ of the way down the page, add any information your instructor requests you to include – your name, student code, the course name and code, and the date. Each new piece of information appears on a new line.
The title page should not have a page number but should be included in the page count – in other words; the page numbering starts on page 2.
This is how your title page should look:
Watch this video to learn how to start page numbering from page two in Microsoft Word:
Prose quotations of five or more lines (or more than 100 words) and poetry quotations of two or more lines are presented as block quotes.
Block quotes do not use quotation marks. Instead, a blank line separates them from the surrounding text on both sides, indented by an additional ½ inch. Unlike the rest of the text, they are not double-spaced.
Your block quotes should look like this:
It is important for you to know that there are two versions of this format: the author-date version and the notes and bibliography version. You need to format your paper based on the professor's instructions. Now, let's review each version of Chicago Style.
Author-date Version
In-text Citations
In Chicago author-date style, you cite sources in parentheses in the text. The citation includes the author’s last name followed by the year of publication, with no punctuation in between:
(Smith 2012)
Citations are placed directly in the text in parentheses. In this style, you have some flexibility about how exactly to integrate the citation.
The reference list appears at the end of your paper and provides more detailed information about the sources you cited.
Each entry in the reference list also begins with the author’s last name and the publication date so that your reader can easily find any source they encounter in the text:
Your reference list is usually titled “References” or “Works Cited.” It is alphabetized by author's last name. It is single-spaced, unlike the main text, but a blank line is left between entries.
Entries extending onto more than one line have a “hanging indent,” meaning the second and subsequent lines are indented.
Your reference list should look like this:
PRO TIP: To make this task easier, we recommend you create your citations on MyBib (please read our "How to Use MyBib" article to learn more about this tool).
Notes and Bibliography Version
In-text Citations
Each time a source is quoted or paraphrased, a superscript number is placed in the text, corresponding to a footnote or endnote containing details of the source.
Footnotes appear at the bottom of the page, while endnotes appear on a separate page at the end of the text.
It looks like this at the bottom of the page:
Full Foot-Notes and Short Foot-Notes
There are two types of footnotes in Chicago style: full notes and short notes.
The full publication details of the source. The first citation of each source should be a full note.
1. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11.
The author’s last name, the title (shortened if longer than four words), and the page number (if relevant). They are used for all subsequent citations of the same source. It’s also acceptable to use “ibid.” instead to refer to the immediately preceding source.
2. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 11.
The guidelines for using short and full notes can vary across different fields and institutions. Sometimes you might be required to use a full note for every citation or a short note every time as long as all sources appear in the bibliography.
Examples:
Watch this video to learn how to add footnotes to a paper in Microsoft Word:
What if you don't have all the information you need for your notes?
If one of your sources (e.g., a website) has no page numbers, but you still think it’s important to cite a specific part of the text, other locators like headings, chapters, or paragraphs can be used. Abbreviate words like “paragraph” to “par.” and “chapter” to “chap.” and put headings in quotation marks:
1. Johnson, “Literature Review,” chap. 2.1.
2. Smith, “Thematic Analysis,” under “Methodology.”
If the source lacks a stated publication date, the abbreviation “n.d.” (no date) should replace the year in a full note:
1. Smith, Data Analysis (New York: Norton, n.d.), 293.
If a text doesn’t list its author’s name, the organization that published it can be treated as the author in your citation:
1. Gradehacker, “Chicago Style Citation.”
If you use a website name as an author, you may repeat the same information twice in one citation. Omit the website name from its usual place if you’ve already listed it in the author's place.
Bibliography
A Chicago-style bibliography lists the sources cited in your text. Each bibliography entry begins with the author’s name and the source's title, followed by relevant publication details. The bibliography is alphabetized by authors’ last names.
The bibliography appears at the end of your text. The heading Bibliography is bolded and centered at the top of the page.
Unlike the rest of a Chicago format paper, the bibliography is not double-spaced. However, add single line space between entries.
If a bibliography entry extends onto more than one line, subsequent lines should be indented, as seen in the example below. This helps the reader see where each new entry begins at a glance.
Your bibliography should look like this:
Author names in the bibliography are inverted: The last name comes first, then the first name(s). Sources are alphabetized by author's last name.
If a source has no named author, alphabetize by the first word of the title or organization name that starts the entry. Ignore articles (“the,” “a,” and “an”) for the purposes of alphabetization.
For sources with more than one author, only the first author’s name is inverted; subsequent names are written in the normal order.
For texts with up to 10 authors, all the authors’ names should be listed in the order they appear in the source, separated by commas.
Example:
If there are more than 10 authors, list the first seven, followed by “et al.”
If you include multiple works from the same author, only include the author's name in the first entry. In subsequent entries, replace the name with three em dashes, followed by the rest of the citation formatted as normal. List the entries in alphabetical order by title.