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Chicago/Turabian Style

Need help with formatting citations? Use this brief guide to Chicago/Turabian Style.

Bibliography and Footnotes

Bibliography

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. This is called a bibliography.

Here are nine quick rules for this list:

  1. Start a new page for your bibliography (e.g. If your paper is 4 pages long, start your bibliography on page 5).
  2. Center the title, Bibliography, at the top of the page and do not bold or underline it. Look for the alignment option in Word. 
  3. Leave two blank lines between the title and the first entry on your list.
  4. Single-space the list.
  5. Start the first line of each citation at the left margin; each subsequent line should be indented (also known as a "hanging indent").
  6. Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the citation. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
  7. For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first name followed by a period.
  8. Italicize the titles of full works, such as: books, videos (films and television shows), artwork, images, maps, journals, newspapers, magazines.
  9. Do not italicize titles of parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document. Instead, use quotation marks.

Page Order

Assemble your paper in the following order:

  • Title page
  • Body of paper
  • Appendix (if needed)
  • Bibliography

Font

Use Times New Roman, Size 12 (unless otherwise instructed).

Margins and Indents

Your margins should be 1 inch on all sides.

Indent new paragraphs by one-half inch.

Spacing

Double-space the main text of your paper.

Single-space the footnotes and bibliography.

Numbering

Start numbering your pages on the second page of your paper (don't include the title page).

Put your page numbers in the header of the first page of text (skip the title page), beginning with page number 1. Continue numbering your pages to the end of the bibliography.

Footnotes

Place the footnote number at the end of the sentence in which you have quoted or paraphrased information from another source. The footnote number should be in superscript, and be placed after any punctuation.

Put your footnotes in the footer section of the page.

What is an Annotated Bibliography?

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations for various books, articles, and other sources on a topic. The annotated bibliography looks like a Works Cited page but includes an annotation after each source cited. An annotation is a short summary and/or critical evaluation of a source.

Types of Annotations

summary annotation focuses on description and describes the source by answering the following questions:

  • Who wrote the document?
  • When and where was the document written?
  • Why was the document produced?
  • How was the document provided to the public?

An evaluative annotation includes a summary as listed above but also critically assesses the work for accuracy, relevance, and quality. Evaluative annotations can help you learn about your topic, develop a thesis statement, decide if a specific source will be useful for your assignment, and determine if there is enough valid information available to complete your project. The focus is on description and evaluation.

Tips for writing an evaluative annotation:

  • Cite the source using Chicago style.
  • Describe the main ideas, arguments, themes, theses, or methodology, and identify the intended audience.
  • Explain the author’s expertise, point of view, and any bias he/she may have.
  • Compare to other sources on the same topic that you have also cited to show similarities and differences.
  • Explain why each source is useful for your research topic and how it relates to your topic.
  • Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each source.
  • Identify the observations or conclusions of the author. 

Formatting tips for an annotated bibliography:

  • Each annotation should be one paragraph, between three to six sentences long (about 150- 200 words).
  • Start with the same format as a regular Bibliography list.
  • All lines should be double-spaced. Do not add an extra line between the citations.
  • If your list of citations is especially long, you can organize it by topic.
  • Try to be objective, and give explanations if you state any opinions.
  • Use the third person (e.g., he, she, the author) instead of the first person (e.g., I, my, me)

Footnotes

Each time you refer to a source in your writing, whether through a direct quote, paraphrase, or summary, you must include a corresponding footnote that provides bibliographic information about the original source. 

Whenever you refer to material from a source, you must insert a "footnote number" at the end of the paraphrased section or direct quotation. This directs readers to a corresponding footnote (with the same footnote number) at the bottom of the page on which the reference to the source is made. The first footnote number will be 1, the second will be 2, and so on. In the body of your text you use superscript (like this1) for the footnote number, while in the footnote you use a regular number followed by a period.

Quoting

Quoting is using the exact words from another text in your research paper as it was originally written. When quoting, place quotation marks (" ") around the selected passage to show where the quote begins and where it ends. You must include a footnote number at end of the quotation and a footnote at the bottom of the page.

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is restating a part of a text using your own words but keeping the original meaning. You must include a footnote number at end of the paraphrased section and a footnote at the bottom of the page.

Quote Format

"Here's a direct quote."1

Quote Example

The outcome of Tsilhqot'in Nation v. British Columbia "will help ensure that no company can come into First Nations territory to log, mine, or explore for oil and gas without seeking agreement."

___________

1. Annette Sorensen and Scott van Dyk, Indigenous Perspectives on Business Ethics and Business Law in British Columbia (BCCampus, 2022), chap. 12, https://opentextbc.ca/indigenousperspectivesbusiness/.

Paraphrase Format

​This is a paraphrase.1

Paraphrase Example

Research suggests that volunteers who are given detailed suggestions of how many hours to volunteer each week, in order to meet the overall time commitment requirements, end up volunteering more hours than those who were only given vague suggestions.1 

___________

1. Aneesh Rai et al., "Accomplishing Big Goals," Scientific American, May 2024, Academic Search Ultimate.

Note: This source has no page numbers, so page numbers are left out of the footnote.


Long Quotations

What Is a Long Quotation?

If your quotation is longer than five lines, or more than 100 words, it is a considered a long quotation. This can also be referred to as a block quotation. Long quotations should be single-spaced, with a blank line inserted before and after the quotation to separate it from the rest of your text.

Rules for Long Quotations

There are 3 rules that apply to long quotations that are different from regular quotations:

  1. Place a colon at the end of the line that you write to introduce your long quotation.
  2. Indent the long quotation 0.5 inches from the rest of the text, so it looks like a block of text.
  3. Do not put quotation marks around the quotation.

Example of a Long Quotation

The logic used by conservationists to justify the protection--or destruction--of non-human life tends to be quite fragile:

Conservation has as its aim the independent flourishing of nonhuman life, but in reality, non-human abundance that is not engineered by human society invites responses of suppression. Ambivalence toward autonomous nonhuman flourishing can be seen in dominant conservationist responses to those animals that do manage to thrive in the human-dominated landscapes that characterize today’s Earth. Such organisms are more often than not reviled and suppressed as pests, invasive species, vectors of disease, or simply not 'valuable.'1 

___________

1. Krithika Srinivasan and Rosemary Collard, "Nature Without Conservation," Current History 122, no. 847 (2023): 293.

Shortened Footnotes

In Chicago style, the first time you cite a particular source you must provide a full footnote citation. If you refer to the same source again in your paper, you do not need to repeat the same full citation. Instead, you provide a shortened version of the footnote, which includes enough information for the reader to find the full citation in your bibliography or in an earlier footnote.

Shortened footnotes should include the author’s last name, a shortened version of the title (if longer than four words), and any other directing information, such as page numbers (when available).

Examples (First three are full footnotes, last three are shortened versions)

  • Krithika Srinivasan and Rosemary Collard, "Nature Without Conservation," Current History 122, no. 847 (2023): 290.
  • The Squamish Nation. Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw: We Come From This Land: A Walk Through the History of the Squamish People (Page Two, 2024), 219.
  • Jeff Yang, "Minding the Gap," in The Golden Screen: The Movies that Made Asian America (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2023), 155.
  • Srinivasan and Collard, "Nature Without Conservation," 293.
  • The Squamish Nation, Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw, 223.
  • Yang, "Minding the Gap," 155.