History & Theology
Turabian Citation Generator
Create accurate Turabian footnotes and bibliography entries for books, chapters, journal articles and archival sources. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on Turabian, A Manual for Writers, 9th edition
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Turabian cites in a footnote, not in brackets
In the notes-bibliography system a superscript number in the text points to a footnote carrying the full citation. The bibliography then repeats the source in a different, inverted form.
- In the text
- …as Tuchman argued.1
- At the foot
- 1. Barbara W. Tuchman, …
Turabian citation examples by source type
Every entry appears twice in a Turabian paper: once as a footnote the first time you cite it, and once in the bibliography. Both forms are shown below.
Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Footnote: Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
The bibliography inverts the first name so the list can be alphabetised. The footnote does not.
Last, First. Title of Book. 3rd ed. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First. Title of Book. Translated by First Last. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First, First Last, First Last, and First Last. Title of Book. City: Publisher, YYYY.
The bibliography lists up to ten names. The footnote collapses to the first author plus et al.
A chapter in an edited volume names the chapter in quotation marks and the book in italics, with the page range in the bibliography entry.
Last, First. "Title of Chapter." In Title of Book, edited by First Last, 100–125. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First. Introduction to Title of Book, by First Last, xi–xx. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Last, First. "Title of Chapter." In Title of Book, edited by First Last, vol. 2 of Series Title, 100–125. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Journal names are given in full, not abbreviated. The volume is followed by the issue, then the year in parentheses and the page range 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.
The footnote gives the single page you are citing; the bibliography gives the whole range.
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.
Archival material is the reason historians use Turabian. Cite the item first, then the collection, then the repository.
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.
Gen. 1:1–3 (New Revised Standard Version).
Scripture is cited in the text or a note and normally kept out of the bibliography.
Last, First. Title of Document. YYYY. Reprinted in Title of Collection, edited by First Last, 100–125. City: Publisher, YYYY.
Give the date the page was published or revised. When neither exists, give the date you consulted it.
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.
Theses are cited like unpublished works: the title in quotation marks, then 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 Turabian 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.
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- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
Turabian 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 Turabian, A Manual for Writers, 9th edition · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon Turabian citation mistakes
- Using the bibliography form in a footnote Notes do not invert the name and use commas where the bibliography uses full stops. They are two different formats, not one with variations.
- Repeating the full note every time Only the first citation of a source is given in full. After that it shortens to author, short title, page.
- Abbreviating journal titles Turabian spells journal names out in full, unlike the science styles.
- Citing a page range in a note A note points at the page you are actually using. The full range belongs in the bibliography.
- Mixing notes-bibliography with author-date Turabian has both systems. History and theology use notes-bibliography; pick one and use it throughout.
- Leaving archival material out of the bibliography Manuscript collections are listed by collection and repository, not by individual letter.
Turabian quick reference (one page, PDF)
Note form and bibliography form side by side for every source type, including archival material, plus the shortened-note rule. 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 and scriptural citation patterns
- Where the notes-bibliography and author-date systems differ
Turabian citation generator FAQ
Is this Turabian citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export Turabian citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
What is the difference between a Turabian footnote and a bibliography entry?
The footnote reads as prose: names in normal order, publication details in parentheses, and the single 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. Our generator produces both.
Is Turabian the same as Chicago?
Turabian is the student edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. The citation forms are the same; Turabian adds guidance on formatting a thesis or dissertation and drops what only publishers need.
Which system should I use, notes-bibliography or author-date?
History, theology, literature and the arts use notes-bibliography, which is what this generator produces. The sciences and social sciences use the author-date system. If your department has not said, ask before you start.
How do I write a shortened note?
After the first full note, later citations of the same source give the author surname, a short form of the title, and the page: Tuchman, Guns of August, 142.
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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