Always Credit:

• Direct quotes and paraphrased ideas

• Facts that are not common knowledge

• Ideas, thoughts, opinions and any other creation expressed by others

Do Not Credit:

• Common knowledge and accepted wisdom

• Commonly known literary, artistic, or religious works

If you're not sure, go ahead and cite it.

Citing sources is a two-part process of gathering the publishing (or bibliographic) information for each source and formatting according to the rules in the CMOS handbook.  Chicago style citations come in two formats: notes and bibliography, used most often in the humanities, or author-date, used by the sciences and social sciences.  Check with your instructor for the preferred format.

Notes and Bibliography:

1. Create a bibliography of your resources.  Although this goes at the end of your paper, it's a good idea to add to this page as you locate sources.  To learn more about creating a bibliography, see the CMOS sample citations. 

2. As you quote or paraphrase your sources, create footnotes or endnotes within your paper.  When you refer to a source in your text, insert a superscript number at the end of the sentence usually after the punctuation. The superscript number corresponds to a footnote at the bottom of the page (footnote) or at the end of the document (endnote), where you provide the full citation of the source. The first time you cite a source, provide the full citation. For subsequent citations of the same source, you can use a shortened form.

Author-Date:

1. Create a reference list of your resources.  Although this goes at the end of your paper, it's a good idea to add to this page as you locate sources.  To learn more about creating a reference list, see the CMOS sample citations. 

2. Create in-text citations within your paper as you quote or paraphrase your sources.  In CMOS notes and bibliography style this comes at the end of the quote or paraphrase and is formatted to look like this: (Author's Last Name year published, page number).

In either format, each source you cite in the paper must appear in your bibliography or reference list; likewise, each entry in the bibliography or reference list must be cited in your text.

CMOS requires that any content created by AI must be cited.  To learn more visit the CMOS Online Q&A on this topic.

If using a citation generator, remember that computers make mistakes.  You are the final judge on the correctness of your citations!