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.  The 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.   Here is an example.

Example: Pompey Magnus’s army met the troops of Julius Caesar at the battle of Pharsalus, where Pompey was defeated after his cavalry was routed.¹

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.

Each source citation number is then linked to a footnote at the bottom of the page containing more details about the source.  Here is an example of a footnote for our source above about the battle Pharsalus.  In this case, the source is a book and we can see the details about the author, title, publisher, publication date, and page number of the information.  Here is information about how to insert a footnote in Word.

Example: 1. John Smith, Julius Caesar (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), 315–16.

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]