Cite Your Sources: Chicago

Chicago Manual of Style is often used for History classes. The Chicago Manual of Style presents two basic documentation systems: (1) notes and bibliography and (2) author-date. Choosing between the two often depends on subject matter and the nature of sources cited, as each system is favored by different groups of scholars. The Chicago Manual of Style is now in the 17th edition.

• Center the word Bibliography (with a capital B) one inch from the top of a new page at the end of the paper. Include all sources that have been quoted, summarized, or paraphrased in the paper.
• Use a hanging indent: begin the first line of each entry at the left margin and indent all subsequent lines of an entry one-half inch (5 spaces). Entries are single-spaced, with double-spacing between entries.
• Alphabetize sources by the authors’ last names.  List authors by last name, first name. If a source has no author, alphabetize by title.  If the first word of the title is A, An, or The, alphabetize the source by the second word of the title instead.
• Include the city and publisher for books, separated by a colon.  Names of publishers are shortened, usually to the first principal word (example: “Wiley” for “John Wiley and Sons”).
• Titles of books, websites, databases, and journals are italicized.  Titles of articles, chapters, poems, and other short works are put in quotation marks.
• Capitalize all title words except for articles (a, an, the), prepositions (to, from, between, etc.), and coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, etc.), unless a particular word is the first or last word of the title or subtitle.
• Chicago style does not require including an access date for online sources.  However, if your professor would like it included, place it in brackets, after the other publication information and the website address (example: [accessed July 8, 2010]).

Example of a Bibliography entry:

Giaquinto, Richard A. “Instructional Issues and Retention of First-Year Students.” Journal of College Student Retention 11, no. 2 (2009-2010): 267-285.

Example of a Notes entry for the same source:

1. Richard A. Giaquinto, “Instructional Issues and Retention of First-Year Students,” Journal of College Student Retention 11, no. 2 (2009-2010): 267-285.

Examples of subsequent Notes entries for the same source when it is used again later in the paper (presented in an abbreviated form):

14.  Giaquinto, “Instructional Issues,” 268.

15.  Ibid., 270.

When you document your sources using the Chicago Manual of Style, you have to use numbers within the body of your paper to refer readers to the Notes page and the Bibliography page at the end of your paper. The numbers are placed immediately after a quotation, a paraphrase, or a summary and are raised above the regular text by using superscript.

Notes: On the Notes page, you need to list all your sources in the order in which you use them. The first time you use a source, you should include all the information about the author, title, and publication information, but for subsequent uses of the same source, you can use a shortened format. If you refer to the same source in consecutive references, you can use the abbreviation “Ibid,” which is Latin for “the same place."

Bibliography: A bibliography page is an alphabetical listing (by author, or by title if no author is listed) of all your sources. The information listed includes the following: the author (last name, first name); the title (in italics for a long work like a book or a movie and in quotation marks for a short work like an article, a poem, or a short story) with capital letters for all key words; and the publication information (which varies somewhat from one source to another.

Note, too, that entries for the Notes page and the Bibliography page are single spaced with double spacing between the entries. Some common examples are listed below with the Note entry first (with a number preceding it) followed by the Bibliography entry.