This Chicago citation generator formats references in the Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition, used across history, art history and much of publishing. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL or title and the generator formats the retrieved record. Chicago offers two complete systems, and picking the wrong one is the single most common mistake in submitted coursework, so the generator produces the notes-bibliography form that humanities courses expect.
Real Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition references, formatted the way history, art history and publishing coursework expects them.
Footnote (first, full)
1. Jane Smith, Rivers and Empire: Water in the Colonial Imagination (Boston: Meridian, 2024), 42.
Footnote (shortened)
2. Smith, Rivers and Empire, 57.
Bibliography entry
Smith, Jane. Rivers and Empire: Water in the Colonial Imagination. Boston: Meridian, 2024.
Chicago supports notes-bibliography, where a superscript number points to a footnote or endnote, and author-date, where the citation sits in parentheses. History, literature and the arts use notes-bibliography. The sciences and social sciences use author-date. Ask which one your department requires before you start, because the punctuation differs throughout.
1. Jane Smith, Rivers and Empire (Boston: Meridian, 2024), 42.
Citing a website in Chicago needs the author or organisation, the page title in quotation marks, the site name, the publication or last-modified date, and the URL. Add an access date only when the page carries no date of its own, since Chicago treats access dates as a fallback rather than a requirement.
3. “Air Quality and Health,” World Health Organization, last modified March 11, 2024, https://www.who.int/example.
The pattern each source type follows, as a quick reference. Fields in the generator are filled from the database record, but these are what the finished entries should look like.
Book note
1. First Last, Title of Book (City: Publisher, Year), 42.
Book bibliography
Last, First. Title of Book. City: Publisher, Year.
Journal note
2. First Last, “Title of Article,” Journal Name 36, no. 2 (Year): 118-34.
Chapter note
3. First Last, “Chapter Title,” in Book Title, ed. First Last (City: Publisher, Year), 55-78.
Web page note
4. “Page Title,” Site Name, last modified Month DD, YYYY, URL.
Author-date
(Last Year, 42) with a References list entry: Last, First. Year. Title of Book. City: Publisher.
Chicago is used across history, art history, religious studies, anthropology and much of publishing. Its notes-bibliography system is the humanities default in North America and is widely taught in the UK too. The author-date system, which is the same manual's second option, appears in some social science and science writing. The seventeenth edition remains what most departments specify, though an eighteenth was published in 2024, so it is worth confirming which one your handbook means.
The notes-bibliography system needs two sets of entries with different punctuation, and getting them the wrong way round is the most visible Chicago error.
The two systems in the same manual are genuinely different papers to write, and choosing the wrong one is more disruptive than choosing the wrong style entirely.
| In-text form | Superscript note number | (Smith 2024, 42) |
|---|---|---|
| List heading | Bibliography | References |
| Year position | In parentheses with publisher | Straight after the author |
| Discursive comments | Possible, in the notes | Not possible |
| Typical field | History and the arts | Sciences and social sciences |
History, literature, art history and theology use notes-bibliography. The sciences and most social sciences use author-date. Your department handbook is the authority, and mixing the two in one paper is the error markers notice first.
Turabian is Chicago rewritten for students. The reference formats are essentially identical, but Turabian drops the publishing-industry material and adds guidance on papers, theses and dissertations.
It produces the full note and the bibliography entry, so you can paste the note into your footnote and the entry into your bibliography. Shortened notes follow the pattern shown in the examples above.
The 18th edition was published in 2024, but most departments were still specifying the 17th at the time of writing. Check your handbook, and if it does not say, ask before assuming the newer edition applies.
Give the specific item, then the collection, then the repository, working from smallest to largest. Chicago is unusually accommodating here because it was designed for historians, and the notes system lets you add explanatory detail about the archive that no author-date style has room for.
The 18th edition was published in 2024 and refines rather than overturns the 17th. Most departments were still specifying the 17th at the time of writing, and reference formats are largely unchanged between them, but confirm with your handbook if it matters for your submission.
The format changes with the kind of source. These walk through the cases students hit most.
APA
psychology, education and the social sciences
(Smith & Jones, 2024, p. 42)
MLA
literature and the humanities
(Smith 42)
AMA
medicine
Smith et al reported similar findings.¹
IEEE
electrical engineering and computer science
as shown in [1], [3]–[5]
ACS
chemistry
as previously reported¹
Turabian
undergraduate humanities writing
1. Jane Smith, Rivers and Empire (Boston: Meridian, 2024), 42.
Vancouver
biomedicine
previous studies (1,2) have shown
Harvard
UK and Australian universities
(Smith and Jones, 2024, p. 42)
CSE
biology and the natural sciences
recent work¹ confirms