Humanities
Chicago Citation Generator
Create accurate Chicago footnotes and bibliography entries for books, chapters, articles and archival sources. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition
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Chicago has two systems. This page builds notes.
In notes-bibliography, used across the humanities, a superscript number in the text points to a footnote holding the full citation, and the bibliography repeats the source in inverted form.
- In the text
- …as Tuchman argued.1
- At the foot
- 1. Barbara W. Tuchman, …
Chicago citation examples by source type
Shown in the notes-bibliography system, which is what the humanities use. Every entry appears once as a footnote and once in the bibliography.
Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Footnote: Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
The note reads as prose; the bibliography inverts the first name so the list can be alphabetised.
Last, First, First Last, and First Last. Title of Book. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First. Title of Book. 3rd ed. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First. Title of Book. Translated by First Last. City: Publisher, YYYY.
The chapter takes quotation marks, the book is italic, and the bibliography entry carries the full page range.
Last, First. "Title of Chapter." In Title of Book, edited by First Last, 100–125. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First. "Title of Chapter." In Title of Series, edited by First Last, vol. 2, 100–125. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First. Introduction to Title of Book, by First Last, xi–xx. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Journal names are given in full. The volume is followed by the issue, then the year in parentheses, then the pages after a colon.
Scott, Joan W. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075. https://doi.org/10.2307/1864376.
Footnote: Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075.
Last, First. "Title of Article." Journal Name 12, no. 3 (YYYY): 100–125.
Last, First. "Title of Article." Journal Name 12, no. 3 (YYYY): 100–125. JSTOR.
Last, First. "Title of Article." Name of Newspaper, Month DD, YYYY. https://example.com/article.
Newspapers are often cited in a note only and left out of the bibliography.
Give the date the page was published or revised. Where there is none, give the date you consulted it instead.
Last, First. "Title of Page." Site Name. Month DD, YYYY. https://example.com/page.
Last, First. "Title of Page." Site Name. Accessed Month DD, YYYY. https://example.com/page.
Name of Organisation. "Title of Page." Month DD, YYYY. https://example.com/page.
Archival material is cited item first, then collection, then repository. This is the block that separates Chicago from the science styles.
First Last to First Last, Month DD, YYYY, box 4, folder 12, Name of Collection, Name of Repository, City.
Name of Collection. Name of Repository, City.
First Last (title), interview by First Last, Month DD, YYYY, transcript, Name of Repository.
Name of Agency. Title of Document. City: Government Printing Office, YYYY.
A thesis is unpublished work: the title takes quotation marks, followed by the degree, institution and year.
Last, First. "Title of Dissertation." PhD diss., University Name, YYYY.
Last, First. "Title of Thesis." Master's thesis, University Name, YYYY.
Last, First. "Title of Dissertation." PhD diss., University Name, YYYY. ProQuest (AAT 1234567).
Build your Chicago bibliography
- Brown, Tom B., Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, and Arvind Neelakantan. "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (2020): 1877–1901.
- He, Kaiming, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2016): 770–778. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.90.
- Jinek, Martin, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier. "A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity." Science 337, no. 6096 (2012): 816–821. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1225829.
- Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. "Attention is All You Need." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (2017): 5998–6008.
- Saved in your browser Your bibliography is stored locally.
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- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
Chicago citation rules at a glance
- Two forms, one source A footnote the first time you cite it, an inverted bibliography entry at the end.
- Notes, not parentheses A superscript number in the text, full citation at the foot of the page.
- Author names Notes read as prose: First Last. The bibliography inverts the first author only.
- Four or more authors The note gives the first author and et al. The bibliography lists up to ten.
- Shortened notes After the first full note, later citations shorten to author, short title, page.
- Journal names in full No abbreviations. American Historical Review, never Am. Hist. Rev.
Checked against the Based on The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon Chicago citation mistakes
- Mixing the two Chicago systems Notes-bibliography and author-date are alternatives, not layers. Pick the one your department uses and keep to it.
- Using the bibliography form in a footnote The note does not invert the name and uses commas where the bibliography uses full stops.
- Repeating the full note every time Only the first citation is given in full. After that it shortens to author, short title, page.
- Using ibid. throughout The 17th edition discouraged it and the 18th prefers the shortened note. Ibid. is easy to break when you move a paragraph.
- Abbreviating journal titles Chicago spells journal names out in full, unlike the science styles.
- Leaving archival material out of the bibliography Manuscript collections are listed by collection and repository, not by individual item.
Chicago quick reference (one page, PDF)
Note form and bibliography form side by side for every source type, plus the shortened note and where author-date differs. Print it, or hand it to a seminar group.
- Note and bibliography forms shown together, source type by source type
- The shortened note, with a worked example
- Archival, interview and government-document patterns
- What changes if your department wants author-date instead
Chicago citation generator FAQ
Is this Chicago citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export Chicago citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
Which Chicago system should I use?
History, literature, theology and the arts use notes-bibliography, which is what this generator produces. The sciences and social sciences use author-date. If your department has not said, ask before you start writing.
What is the difference between a footnote and a bibliography entry?
The footnote reads as prose: names in normal order, publication details in parentheses, and the page you are citing. The bibliography inverts the first author so the list can be alphabetised, uses full stops instead of commas, and gives the full page range.
Is Chicago the same as Turabian?
Turabian is the student edition of Chicago. The citation forms are the same; Turabian adds guidance on formatting a thesis and drops what only publishers need. Our Turabian generator produces the same output.
Should I still use ibid.?
Chicago now prefers the shortened note. Ibid. is still permitted, but it breaks as soon as you move a paragraph, which is why most editors have stopped using it.
Where does the citation metadata come from?
Crossref for DOIs and Open Library for ISBNs. Archival sources have no catalogue record, so those you enter by hand using the patterns on this page. See our methodology.
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