Chicago offers two types of Citations
Notes and Bibliography Guidelines
Author-Date Guidelines
Check with your teacher which one they want you to use!
Notes and Bibliography Citations
This style is popular in the humanities—including literature, history, and the arts. In this system, sources are cited in numbered footnotes or endnotes. Each note corresponds to a raised (superscript) number in the text. Sources are also usually listed in a separate bibliography.
Notes are used in the body of your writing to acknowledge when you have used information from a source. This is true even if you have paraphrased the information and put it into your own words! The notes are a brief version of the full bibliography entry.
Example: Footnote
Anderson views “national identity as a distinctive mode of consciousness: the nation as a whole imagining itself to be the unified subject of history.”1
1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983), 37-46.
The Footnote comes in the Footer at the end of the page the quotation is on. If using Endnotes, the note comes in the Footer of the last page.
The first note referring to a work must be a full note. The full note includes all the citation details, including author/creator name(s), title information, publication information, and page(s) cited. Details will vary depending on the source type, which will be discussed later in the tutorial.
Example: Full Note
1. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt, 1999), 25
After you write a full note, subsequent citations for the same work can be shortened notes. Shortened notes should include just enough information to remind readers of the full title or lead them to the bibliography. Shortened notes usually include the last name of the author, the key words of the main title, and the page number.
Example: Shortened Note
2. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath, 25.
Example:
Red Deer Polytechnic Library. (n.d.-b). Chicago Fundamentals (18th edition) tutorial from Red Deer Polytechnic Library. Libwizard. https://rdc-ab.libwizard.com/f/chicago
Author-Date Guidelines Citations
This style is more common in the physical, natural, and social sciences. In this system, sources are briefly cited in the text, usually in parentheses, by author’s last name and year of publication. Each citation in the text matches up with an entry in a reference list, where full bibliographic information is provided.