Chicago notes and bibliography style: the complete guide

Chicago style is really two styles, and half the referencing errors in Chicago theses come from mixing them. The notes and bibliography system uses numbered footnotes or endnotes plus a bibliography, and it is the standard in history, literature, art history, and much of the humanities. The author-date system uses in-text citations like (Lepore 2018) and belongs mostly to the sciences and social sciences; it has its own conventions and its own generator.

This guide covers the notes and bibliography system: full notes, shortened notes, the bibliography, and the places students get caught. The authority is The Chicago Manual of Style. The 17th edition is still what most departments cite; the 18th, published in 2024, changed some details, notably making the place of publication optional for books. Check which edition your department requires before you format anything.

By the end you will know how to write a first note, shorten every note after it, build the bibliography from the same information, cite the awkward primary sources history theses depend on, and automate all of it.

Notes and bibliography or author-date: which Chicago do you need

If your guidance just says 'Chicago', the discipline usually decides:

• History, literature, philosophy, theology, and the arts almost always mean notes and bibliography.
• Social sciences and natural sciences using Chicago usually mean author-date.
• If you were told 'Turabian', you are using the student version of Chicago, and the citation forms below are the same.

Why the two systems cannot be mixed

A thesis with (Author Year) citations in one chapter and footnotes in the next reads as two documents stapled together, and examiners say so in reports. The usual cause is inheritance: notes from a supervisor's template, a reference list from a citation manager's default preset. Reconcile them before you write further, because converting a finished chapter between systems means touching every citation in it.

Watch for the hybrid failure case too: footnotes that contain (Author Year) strings copied straight from reading notes. Every note should follow the full or shortened forms below, with no parenthetical citations inside them.

The full note: your first citation of a source

A superscript number in the text, placed after punctuation, points to a note. The first note for any source carries the full reference: 1. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 412.

The anatomy: author in natural order, title in italics with headline capitalisation, publication details in parentheses in the order city, publisher, year, then the page you are citing. Elements are separated by commas, and there is no 'p.' before the page number.

Journal article, first note: 2. Amara Osei, "Cartography and Empire in West Africa," Journal of Historical Geography 63 (2019): 41. Article title in double quotation marks, journal title in italics, volume number, year in parentheses, a colon, then the page. When a journal paginates by issue, the issue number joins in: Journal of Cold War Studies 21, no. 2 (2019): 45.

Multiple authors: two or three are all named in the note, in natural order. For four or more, the note gives the first author followed by 'et al.', while the bibliography names the authors in full. E-books without stable pagination cite a chapter or section marker instead of a page, plus the format or platform.

Shortened notes, and what happened to ibid.

Every citation after the first uses the shortened form: surname, shortened title, page. 3. Lepore, These Truths, 415. The short title keeps the first distinctive words of the main title, in italics for books and in quotation marks for articles.

Short titles for articles work the same way: 4. Osei, "Cartography and Empire," 44. Keep short titles stable across chapters; if the same work is shortened two different ways, your reader will count your sources wrong.

Generations of students learned to use ibid. for consecutive citations of the same work. The 17th edition of the manual now discourages ibid. in favour of shortened notes, partly because in electronic formats a reader landing mid-chapter cannot see what ibid. refers back to. If your department still allows it, ibid. may only refer to the single work in the immediately preceding note. The shortened note is always correct and it survives revision; ibid. does not.

Footnotes or endnotes, and where the note number goes

The system is called notes and bibliography because it does not care whether the notes sit at the foot of the page or at the end of the chapter. Footnotes are kinder to examiners, who read with one eye on your evidence; endnotes suit heavily annotated manuscripts where the notes would swallow the page. Thesis regulations often decide for you.

If the choice is yours, consider that endnotes carry an extra cost in a thesis: your examiner has to hold two places in the document at once. When your notes are mostly citations rather than commentary, footnotes are the safer default.

Wherever the notes live, the numbers behave the same way. They go at the end of the clause or sentence they support, after closing punctuation and after closing quotation marks. One note can carry several sources separated by semicolons, which is tidier than stacking three superscripts on a single full stop.

Longer prose quotations, roughly five lines or a hundred words, are set as block quotations: indented, without quotation marks, with the note number after the final punctuation. Shorter quotations stay in the run of text inside double quotation marks.

Building the Chicago bibliography

The bibliography lists every source cited, alphabetically by surname, with a hanging indent; most thesis rules want exactly the works cited in the notes, nothing extra. Entries are built from the same information as full notes but formatted differently:

• The author's name is inverted: Lepore, Jill. In notes it stays in natural order.
• Major elements are separated by periods rather than commas.
• Publication details lose their parentheses: New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.
• Cited page numbers disappear; journal articles and chapters keep their full page range.

Worked examples: note and bibliography pairs

Multiple works by one author are grouped under the repeated name and ordered alphabetically by title; anonymous works alphabetise by title, ignoring an initial 'A' or 'The'. Check the manual when your list hits an edge case rather than improvising.

The book note above becomes: Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018. The article becomes: Osei, Amara. "Cartography and Empire in West Africa." Journal of Historical Geography 63 (2019): 33-52.

Book chapter, full note: 4. Elena Duarte, "Silk Roads and Paper Trails," in Trade and Text in the Medieval World, ed. Howard Finch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 88-90. Bibliography: Duarte, Elena. "Silk Roads and Paper Trails." In Trade and Text in the Medieval World, edited by Howard Finch, 77-104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Notice 'ed.' in the note but 'edited by' in the bibliography, and the chapter's full range in the bibliography entry.

Dissertation: 5. Priya Raman, "Famine Relief and Colonial Administration in Madras" (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2019), 66.

Website, full note: 6. "Page Title," Site Name, accessed March 14, 2026, URL. Replace URL with the address; if the page shows a publication or revision date, cite that date and drop the accessed date.

Citing newspapers, archives, and primary sources

History theses live on primary material, and the notes system handles it well. Newspaper article, full note: 7. "Storm Damages Harbour Works," Manchester Guardian, October 12, 1901, 5. Newspapers are usually cited in notes only; many departments leave them out of the bibliography unless a title is central to the project.

Archival material names the item, then the collection, then the repository, moving from specific to general: 8. Ellen Marsh to Charles Marsh, May 4, 1911, Marsh Family Papers, box 3, folder 12, County Record Office, Chester. The bibliography cites the collection as a whole, not each letter.

The rule of thumb for anything unusual: give enough information in the note for your examiner to retrieve the exact item. Chicago's forms are conventions in service of that retrievability, not ends in themselves.

Common Chicago notes and bibliography errors

The recurring mistakes:

• Full notes repeated at every citation instead of shortened notes after the first.
• Bibliography entries formatted like notes, with the commas and parentheses left intact.
• (Author Year) citations mixed into a notes document.
• Ibid. pointing at a note that contains more than one source, which makes it ambiguous.
• Note numbers placed before punctuation; Chicago places them after.
• Sources cited in notes but missing from the bibliography.
• Formatting to the wrong edition of the manual, especially around place of publication.

Generate Chicago notes automatically

Every error in that list is a consistency failure, and consistency is what software is for; mechanical errors deserve mechanical fixes. CiteDash's free Chicago notes generator formats references in the notes and bibliography patterns above.

In a full thesis, the Reference Manager keeps every citation as a database object that resolves to a real paper, never free text, with your bibliography formatted in Chicago notes style or any of 12 supported styles, Turabian and Chicago author-date included. When you compile to DOCX, PDF, or LaTeX, the bibliography is generated with citeproc, so notes and bibliography cannot drift apart; the pipeline is described in compile your thesis to DOCX, PDF, or LaTeX.

That leaves you responsible for the part software cannot fake: whether the source says what your sentence claims it says.

Check the notes before you submit

CiteDash grounds AI-assisted claims in the full-text PDFs it holds, and the Fact Checker verifies each claim against its source before it reaches you, so a note is checked against the passage it cites rather than merely well-formatted. Retracted papers are badged in your library and blocked from citation.

Before submission, walk a sample: pick ten notes at random, open the sources, and confirm the page numbers and the claims. It is the same check your examiner will run, and it is much cheaper to run it first.

Chicago's machinery of notes and bibliography exists to let an examiner walk from any sentence to its evidence in one step. Format the walk correctly, then make sure it leads somewhere.