Chicago/Turabian (Author–Date): The References Section

In Chicago Author–Date style, the sources you cite in your paper are listed at the end in the References section.

In Chicago/Turabian papers using the Author–Date citation system, all the sources you cite throughout the text of your paper are listed together in full in the References section, which comes after the main text of your paper. (If you are using NB, this will be called the bibliography.)

Formatting the References Section

The top of the page, as the rest of your paper, should still include the page number in the right header. On the first line, the title of the page—“References”—should appear centered and not italicized or bolded. After the page title, leave two blank lines before your first citation.

Unlike the rest of your paper, this page should not be double-spaced: leave a blank line between each citation, but the citations themselves should not be double-spaced. Your citations should be in alphabetical order by the first word in each citation (usually the author’s last name).

Each reference should be formatted with what is called a hanging indent. This means the first line of each reference should be flush with the left margin (i.e., not indented), but the rest of that reference should be indented one inch from the left margin. Any word-processing program will let you format this automatically so you don’t have to do it by hand. (In Microsoft Word, for example, you simply highlight your citations, click on the small arrow right next to the word “Paragraph” on the home tab, and in the popup box choose “hanging indent” under the “Special” section. Click OK, and you’re done.)

Constructing a Citation

The first step in building each individual citation is to determine the type of resource you are citing, since in each citation style formatting differs slightly based on source type. Some common types are a book, a chapter from a book, a journal article, an online book or article, an online video, a blog post, and personal communication such as an email or an interview you conducted. (You’ll notice that “website” is not a category by itself. If the information you found is online, you want to determine if you’re looking at an online book, an online article, or some other type of document.)

As an example, let’s look in detail at the process of citing three particular sources in Chicago style: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (i.e., a book by one author), Project Gutenberg’s online text of the same book (i.e., an online book), and an online journal article about the book.

Print Sources

Author Name

You always want to start with the author information. You should present the author information in the following order and format: the author’s last name, a comma, the author’s first name, the author’s middle initial (if given), and then a period:

• Conrad, Joseph.

Title of Source

Next, you should include the title of the source in title case. For a book, the title is italicized.

• Heart of Darkness.

City of Publication

Next, you want to provide the location of the publisher’s office. The location is generally a city, such as “London” or “New York, NY.”

• London:

Publisher Name

Next, provide the publisher’s name, followed by a comma:

• Everyman’s Library,

Date of Publication

Now provide the year in which the source was published, followed by a period.

• 1993.

All together, then, the citation looks like this:

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Everyman’s Library, 1993.

Online Sources

Now let’s take a look at the citation for the online version of the same book, available online through the publisher Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Treat the online version of a print book exactly the same as a print book, but with an indication of where you found it online.

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Project Gutenberg, 2006. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm.

Journal Articles and Multiple Authors

• NooriBerzenji, Latef S., and Marwan Abdi. “The Image of the Africans in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business 5, no. 4 (2013): 710–726.

Much of this citation will look familiar to you now that you know the basics. Again, we start with the author information. If the source has multiple authors, the citation rules are a little different. The first author will be listed with their surname first (Conrad, Joseph) but subsequent authors will be listed with their first names first (Joseph Conrad). Use the word “and” (not an ampersand, &) before the last author. Here we have only two authors, but if we had five, the “and” would come before the fifth author’s last name, after the comma following the fourth author’s name.

The date of publication and title are formatted the same. Note that even though APA style says that the article title should not be italicized, the book titles “Heart of Darkness” and “Things Fall Apart” within the article title are still italicized.

The new information here begins with citing the journal this article is from. Include the title of the journal in italicized title case (all major words capitalized, as in the title of a book):

• Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business

Then include the journal volume:

• 5

If an issue number is provided in addition to the volume number, as it is here, add a comma after the volume number, the abbreviation “no.”, and the issue number:

• 5, no. 4

Next, list the year of the article’s publication in parentheses, followed by a colon:

• (2013):

Finally, list the page numbers of the article, followed by a period [note that the dash between the first and second numbers is an en-dash (–), NOT a hyphen (-) or em-dash (—)]:

• 710–726.

Multiple Publications by the Same Author

If you are referencing multiple publications by (or group of authors) that were published in the same year, there is a special rule for denoting this. You should first order those articles alphabetically by source title in the References section. But then, replace the author’s name in all entries except the first one with an em-dash (—).

• Achenbach, Thomas. “Bibliography of Published Studies Using the ASEBA.” Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment, 2012. http://www.aseba.org/asebabib.html.
• —. “School-Age (Ages 6–18) Assessments.” Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment, 2012. http://www.aseba.org/schoolage.html.

Chicago/Turabian (Author–Date): How to Reference Different Types of Sources

In Chicago/Turabian style, there are different formats for citing sources at the end of your paper depending on the type of source.

Now that you know the different components of a book citation in Chicago/Turabian Author–Date style and how they should be formatted, you will be able to understand the citation formats for other source types. Here are some example citations for the most common types of resources you will use. These are how your citations will be formatted on your References page at the end of your Author–Date style paper.

Book by One Author

Doyle, Arthur. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2010.

Book by Multiple Authors

Two or More Authors

(Write out all author names.)

Dubner, Stephen, and Steven Levitt. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.

Brown, Theodore, H. Eugene Lemay, Bruce Bursten, Catherine Murphy, Patrick Woodward, and Matthew Stoltzfus. Chemistry: The Central Science. London: Prentice Hall, 2015.

Book with Author and Editor

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Tales. Edited by Peter Straub. New York: Library of America, 2005.

Article in a Journal with Continuous Pagination

Rottweiler, Frank, and Jacques Beauchemin. “Detroit and Sarnia: Two Foes on the Brink of Destruction.” Canadian/American Studies Journal 54 (2012): 66–146.

Article in a Journal Paginated Separately

Rottweiler, Frank, and Jacques Beauchemin. “Detroit and Sarnia: Two Foes on the Brink of Destruction.” Canadian/American Studies Journal 54, no. 2 (2012): 66–146.

Article in an Internet-Only Journal

Marlowe, Philip, and Sarah Spade. “Detective Work and the Benefits of Colour Versus Black and White.” Journal of Pointless Research 11, no. 2 (2001): 123–124. Accessed October 31, 2015. http://www.jpr.com/stable/detectiveworkcolour.htm.

Page on a Web Site

Pavlenko, Aneta. “Bilingual Minds, Bilingual Bodies.” Psychology Today. Last modified October 7, 2015. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201510/bilingual-minds-bilingual-bodies.

Page on a Web Site, No Author Identified, No Date

“Bilingual Minds, Bilingual Bodies.” Psychology Today. Accessed October 29, 2015. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201510/bilingual-minds-bilingual-bodies.

Chicago/Turabian (Author–Date): In-Text References and Parentheticals

In Chicago/Turabian Author–Date style, in-text citations follow strict formatting rules.

In your paper, when you quote directly from a source in the author’s words, or when you paraphrase someone else’s idea, you need to tell the reader where the words and ideas comes from so the original author gets credit. When you do this within the text  the reader the author’s name and the date the source was published in the text of your paper, this is called an in-text citation.

The Chicago/Turabian citation style uses in-text citations only in its Author–Date method, which is generally used for social science papers and is explained below. If your professor asks you to cite sources with footnotes and bibliography rather than in-text citations, make sure you use the Notes and Bibliography (NB) method rather than the Author–Date method described here.

Source by a Single Author

To cite this type of reference in the text, you should use what is known as a parenthetical —citation information enclosed in parentheses—at the end of the relevant sentence. The parenthetical should include the author’s last name (with no first or middle initial) followed by the year the source was published. If you’re citing a direct quote, you also need to include the page number after a comma. For example:

• Social representations theory posits that reified scientific knowledge that exists at the boundaries of a given society will be interpreted in meaningful and often simplified forms by the majority (Pauling 2005).
• Social representations theory “proposes a new hypothesis…” (Pauling 2005, 113).

If you choose, you can integrate the author’s name into the sentence itself—this is known as a ” signal phrase “—and provide just the year in parentheses:

• Pauling (2005) posits that…

Source by Two or Three Authors

Authors should be presented in the order in which they are listed on the published article. If you include the authors’ names in the parenthetical, use the word “and” between the two names. For example:

• Social representations theory posits that reified scientific knowledge that exists at the boundaries of a given society will be interpreted in meaningful and often simplified forms by the majority (Pauling and Liu 2005).

You may still choose to use a signal phrase instead, but make sure you keep both authors in it:

• Pauling and Liu (2005) posit that…

Source by Four or More Authors

For an article with more than four authors, the first time you cite the article in the text of your paper, you should use only the first author’s name followed by “et al.” and the year of publication. (“Et al.” is short for “et alia,” which means “and other people” in Latin—much like “etc.” is short for “et cetera,” which means “and other things” in Latin.)

• Social representations theory posits that reified scientific knowledge that exists at the boundaries of a given society will be interpreted in meaningful and often simplified forms by the majority (Pauling et al. 2005).

Using a signal phrase:

• Pauling et al. (2005) posit…

Citing Multiple Publications by Different Authors

If you need to cite multiple publications by different authors in the same sentence, you should list the multiple sources in alphabetical order by author and use a semicolon to separate them.

• … majority (Alford 1995; Pauling 2004; Sirkis 2003).

If within this citation you also have multiple sources by the same author, after that author’s name, separate the multiple dates of publication with a comma, and order them chronologically (earliest to latest).

• … majority (Alford 1995; Pauling 2004, 2005; Sirkis 2003).

Citing Multiple Publications by the Same Author

If you need to cite multiple publications by the same author within a sentence, you use a comma to separate the years of publication in chronological order (oldest to most recent).

• … majority (Pauling 2004, 2005).

Using a signal phrase:

• Pauling (2004, 2005) suggests that…