A Note on Using Chicago Citation Style

The Chicago citation style is the method established by the University of Chicago Press. It is widely used for academic writing in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A slight modification of the Chicago style is known as Turabian style. Chicago/Turabian style features two basic documentation systems:

1. Notes-Bibliography Style: used in the humanities (literature, history and the arts). It cites the sources as footnote or endnote and gives a full bibliography at the end of the paper.
2. Author-Date style: used in the social, physical, and natural sciences. It cites the sources in the text, in parentheses, by author’s last name and date of publication. These short citations are detailed on the References page at the end of the paper.

(1) Notes-Bibliography Style

The notes-bibliography format combines two components: (a) footnotes or endnotes (b) Bibliography.

Footnotes/ End Notes

• It is a numbered system whereby authorship is acknowledged using a number to represent the reference. The reader can follow this in-text number to the corresponding number in the footnote or endnote.
• Citation numbers should be inserted in superscript to the right of commas and full stops, and to the left of colons and semi-colons.
• The first source cited on the page is “1,” the second source is “2,” and so on. This numbering system resets with each page, and you start over with “1” instead of moving on to “3.”
• In the endnotes, it is formatted in the exact same way, but the numbering reaches from the first to last page, rather than restarting with each new page.
• Cite authors’ names as they appear in the texts. Don’t replace first names with initials unless the names appear this way on the title page of the source.
• If no author is mentioned in the source, organize the entry by the title.
• The first time you cite a source, you will include a full citation. For all subsequent references to that text, your footnote citation will be in abbreviated form. The shortened form consists of the author’s last name, title (shortened if more than four words) and page.
• All footnotes/endnotes must be chronologically numbered.
• If there is no date of the publication, use n.d. (no date).
• If the second reference to a text comes immediately after the first, use “Ibid.” in place of the author’s name and the book title. Include the page number if it is different from that listed in the first reference.

Example for the First Citation:  Author’s name as in the source, Title in Italics and in Headline Style (City of Publication: Publisher, Year), page number if relevant.

Bipan Chandra, Communalism in India (New Delhi: Har Anand, 1998), 123.

Subsequent references to the same text: 

Last name, Title in Shortened Form, page number. (If there is only one source from the author, then Last name and the page number is enough)

Chandra, 123

(If there is more than one source from the author, then Last name, an abbreviated form of title and the page number is needed)

Chandra, Communalism, 123

Bibliography

A bibliography is a list of the full details of all the sources you cited in your paper. In the Chicago style, the bibliography starts on a separate page at the end of your paper and is titled Bibliography. The Bibliography contains details of the sources used in writing your paper and can include works not cited in your paper that you consulted in your research.

• All sources appearing in the Bibliography must be ordered alphabetically by the last name of the first author or title if there is no author is identified.
• Works by the same author/s are listed alphabetically by title. Bibliographies with only one author are ordered chronologically.
• If notes are given as endnotes, then the bibliography is optional because all the sources are cited in notes already. However, many people choose to create a consolidated list of sources.
• If one includes a range of sources, some of which he/she read but did not specifically need to cite for the paper then should call the document a "Selected Bibliography."
• The name of the first author is inverted; subsequent author’s names are given in the form in which they appear in the original source publication.
• The bibliography should be double spaced and intend every line comes after the first line.
• Italics is the preferred format for titles of books, journals, and videos. However, article and chapter titles are not italicised; these are put in double quotation marks.
• Capitalisation within the Chicago style requires all major words to be first letter upper case.

Format of a Bibliography Entry for a Single Authored Book

• Author’s last name followed by a comma
• First name of the author followed by a full stop
• Title of the book in italics and all major words capitalised followed by a full stop
• Location of the publications followed by a colon
• Publisher followed by a comma
• Year of the publication followed by a full stop

Example: Chandra, Bipan. Communalism in India. New Delhi: Har Anand, 1998.

(2) Chicago Author-Date Style

The Chicago Author-Date style is like a mixture of MLA and APA. Just like in MLA, the Chicago Author-Date style inserts a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence, before the period. But the information included in the parenthetical is more like APA: author, date, and page number. There is no punctuation between the author and date, but the date and page number are separated by a comma:

Example: (Chandra 1998, 123).

If the name of the author is given in the text, then the year and the page number are enough.

Example: Bipan Chandra considered the Indian national movement, a passive revolution (1998, 123)

If there are multiple authors with the same last name, include the first initial in the parenthetical citation: (B. Chandra 1998, 123).

If there are multiple essays by the same author and published in the same year, mark them with a letter, like in APA. (Chandra 1998a, 123).

Reference List

The Date-Author system requires a reference list at the end of the paper, like in MLA or APA.