Chicago Manual Style: In-Text Citations

This page will show you how to cite common types of sources within the text of your Chicago Manual Style papers.

How to cite sources in-text when you paraphrase:

An in-text citation is a short citation that you make when you mention any information from one of the sources you are using for a paper.  You need to do in-text citations even when you paraphrase by putting the words of an author into your own words.  A Chicago Style in-text citation consists of inserting a superscript number beside the information you are citing.  A superscript is a tiny number located to the upper right of the information you are citing. For each superscript number, there is a longer citation in the footer of the paper.  Here is an example.

Paraphrased sentence with citation number at the end: College campuses are becoming increasingly political spaces with liberals and conservatives in conflict with each other.¹

Here is the book that is being cited above.  You can see it has the number 1 at the beginning to show it is the source from the number 1 above.  This citation will go in the footer of your paper.

Footnote citation

1. Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (University of Chicago Press, 2022), 117–18.

Each source you cited will be in number order, beginning with 1, and then 2, 3, 4, etc.  This continues each time you cite a source for your paper.  Here is information about how to insert a footnote in Word. Look at the Chicago Style Sample paper to see more details about this.

 

Examples of Footnote Citations for Different Types of Sources – The following section will show you how to do the most common footnote citations (Books, eBooks, Journal Articles, and Websites) in Chicago Style

Citing a Book – Book citations begin with the author’s first name, then last name, the book title in italics, the publisher and year of publication in parentheses, followed by the page number.

Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (Pantheon Books, 2020), 45.

Citing an eBook – Citing eBooks is the same as a regular book, but you include the chapter instead of the page number, and the web address to the eBook or the platform it was sold on (Kindle, Apple Books, etc).

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Random House, 2008), chap. 6, Kindle.

Citing a Peer Reviewed Journal Article – This example shows how to cite a scholarly peer reviewed article like those you find in EBSCO.  You begin with the author’s first and last name, then the title of the article in quotes, then the journal title in italics, then the volume and issue number, followed by the year the article was published, the pages numbers the article was on, and finally the DOI web address, which should be written on the article.  You may skip the DOI if it isn’t listed.

Hyeyoung Kwon, “Inclusion Work: Children of Immigrants Claiming Membership in Everyday Life,” American Journal of Sociology 127, no. 6 (2022): 1842–43, https://doi.org/10.1086/720277.

Citing a Website Article with an Author and Publication Date – This example is for when you cite a website with an author AND a publication date for when the article is posted on the internet.

Dani Blum, “Are Flax Seeds All That?,” New York Times, December 13, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/well/eat/flax-seeds-benefits.html.

Citing a Website Article with no Author and a no Publication Date – Since there is no author you begin the citation with the name of the website article.  If there is no date for when the article was published online you include the “accessed date”.  Which is the date you looked at the website online.  If you can’t remember the exact date, just try to guess as best you can.

“About Yale: Yale Facts,” Yale University, accessed March 8, 2022, https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.

Quoting Sources

Anytime you use information word for word from a source this is considered a quote and must be placed in quotation marks and cited.  Here is an example of how to quote a source in Chicago Style.

Example:  Dickens could have been speaking of our current moment when he wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”²

Then you would include the rest of the citation in the footer.  In this case it would be.

Example: Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Simon & Shuster, 2010), 1.

Citing AI in a Footnote

Only use AI generated text if your professor allows it.  To cite AI in Chicago Style, you’ll place the information in a footnote.  There is no author when citing AI, so instead write a note that your text was generated by AI, the AI tool, the company that owns it, the date you access the AI, and a link to the AI homepage.

1. Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, March 7, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat.

AI does not need to be cited on the Bibliography page of a Chicago style paper.  For more details on citing AI in Chicago Style, look here. 

For more details on how to cite sources in-text in Chicago Manual Style, consult the Chicago Manual Style website, check out the Library copy of the Chicago Manual Style Handbook,  or contact [email protected]