Chicago Manual of Style

NOTE: Use the information for the Notes-Bibliography style

The Chicago Manual of Style is often used to document sources for papers and assignments in the Humanities (e.g., history, fine arts, philosophy, and political science). Check with your instructor to find out which citation style you should use for an assignment.

This guide is based on the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (published in 2024). It provides selected citation examples for commonly used sources in the of notes/bibliography style. For more detailed information, consult the full style manual available at the TRU Library.

Style, Punctuation, and Usage Changes

• Terminology change: Use "title case" is instead of "headline style"; "sentence case" replaces "sentence style" (Section 8.160)
• Title Capitalization: Capitalize prepositions in title if five letters or more (e.g., After, Through)  (Section 8.161)
• Periodicals Titles: Retain and capitalize the initial article "The" in periodical names (e.g., journal or newspaper) when it appears on the masthead (e.g., The New York Times) (Section 8.168)
• Inclusive Language: The generic singular "they" is explicitly endorsed for formal writing when gender is unknown or irrelevant (Section 5.45; 5.266)
• Identity Group Capitalization: Capitalize the adjective Indigenous when referring to people; Black is also usually capitalized (Section 8.39)
• Colon Punctuation: The first letter of a complete sentence following a colon is now capitalized (Section 6.67)

Citation Simplification

• Place of Publication: No longer required for books published after 1900 (Section 14.30). For books published pre-1900, cite the city of publication instead of the publisher's name (Section 14.31)
• Chapter Page Ranges: Omit the page range for a chapter in an edited book from the bibliography entry (but still cite the page for the note) (Section 14.8)
• Bibliography Spacing: No blank line between entries in the Bibliography. (See 13.66, fig. 13.8)
• Reference Works: Replace the Latin abbreviation s.v. (“under the word”, plural s.vv.) with the word "under" in citations for encyclopedia and dictionary entries (Section 14.130)

Authors

• Author Limits (Bibliography): List up to six authors in a bibliography entry. If there are more than six, list the first three followed by "et al." (Section 13.78)
• Author Limits (Footnotes): List up to two authors in the footnote. If there are three or more, list only the first author followed by "et al." (Section 13.78)

• Eastern Name Order: Do not invert author names that follow Eastern order (family name first) rather than Western order (family name last) in the bibliography (Section 13.75)

Digital and New Media Citations

• AI-Generated Content: Cite in notes like personal communications, including the model name (e.g., ChatGPT, Co-Pilot), date of generation, and the prompt used. Add a URL if publicly accessible. (Section 14.106)
• Social Media: Quote up to the first 280 characters of a post, including spaces and emojis. If citing a pre-July 2023 post on X, format the platform name as Twitter (now X), (Section 14.106)
• Shortened URLs: Do not use third-party shortening services (e.g., Bitly, TinyURL) as they obscure the source's domain information (Section 13.11)
• Film/DVDs: No longer require the distributor's city in the citation (Section 14.161)
• Presentations: Information about presentations is no longer enclosed in parentheses. Citations for papers/posters are generally included only in footnotes, not the bibliography (Section 14.115)
• Newspapers: If the article title is divided by a period, convert it to a colon or use only the first part (Section 14.90)

 Here are three different ways you can present information you have found in your research to consciously avoid plagiarizing.

1. Direct quote

When you use or copy the exact words or section of words from an author, you can surround that direct quote by quotation marks. Include the correct citation acknowledging the original author in your sentence.

2. Summary

Write a summary using your own words of the ideas or the text you want to use. Be original without using the words of the original work and be sure you cite that statement.

3. Paraphrase

Paraphrasing is similar to a summary. It just means taking what you have read and rewriting it in your own words. You must cite that paraphrase.

When teachers ask you to write in "Chicago Style", they are referring to the editorial style that most subjects within Arts and Humanities have adopted to present written material in the field.

Editorial style is a set of rules or guidelines that a publisher observes to ensure clear and consistent presentation of written material. Editorial style  concerns uniform use of such elements as:

• punctuation and abbreviations
• construction of tables
• selection of headings
• citation of references
• presentation of statistics
• as well as many other elements that are a part of every manuscript

The purpose of documentation is to:

• Identify (cite) other people’s ideas and information used within your essay or term paper.
• Indicate the authors or sources of these in a Bibliography at the end of your paper.
• Identify the sources you researched to support your argument.
• Provide all information necessary to enable your readers to find the sources you used.

The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (2024) recognizes two basic styles of citation: Notes-Bibliography and Author-Date. Notes-Bibliography is the standard in the humanities; this guide is only for the Notes and Bibliography system.

"Chicago Manual of Style" by TRU Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).