An Overview of Chicago Referencing (4 Key Facts)

Has your university asked you to use Chicago referencing? And have they completely failed to explain what this means, leaving you confused and upset?

Then you’ve come to the right place! In this post, we offer a quick overview of Chicago referencing, including how to cite sources in an essay.

1. What Is Chicago Referencing?

Chicago referencing is drawn from the Chicago Manual of Style, a style guide published by the University of Chicago Press. As well as citations, it covers writing style and formatting documents.

However, since it’s designed as a guide to American English, most UK universities that use Chicago referencing focus on the rules for citing sources.

2. Two Ways of Citing Sources

Because life is rarely simple, Chicago referencing actually offers two methods of citing sources: author-date citations (popular in the sciences) and footnotes (common in the humanities).

The author–date version uses in-text citations, with the author’s name and the year of publication for a source given in parentheses (along with page numbers if quoting something directly):

The choice of questions in science depends on many factors (Gruen 1996).

The footnote version, meanwhile, indicates citations with superscript numbers (e.g. ¹, ², ³) in the main text. These are accompanied by full source information in a footnote:

1. Lori Gruen, ‘Gendered Knowledge’, in Readings in Animal Cognition, ed. Mark Bekoff and Dale Jamieson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 20.

The footnote version also gives you the option of either:

• Using full footnotes without a bibliography
• Using only shortened notes with a bibliography

However, most universities prefer you to use both full notes and a bibliography. For more on the shortened footnote format, see the ‘Repeat Citations’ section below.

3. Organising the Reference List

As well as citations, Chicago referencing requires listing all sources at the end of your document. This section should be titled ‘Reference List’ if using author–date citations or ‘Bibliography’ if using footnotes. In either case, the format to use is as follows:

• Entries should be listed alphabetically by author surname
• Each entry should be followed by one blank line
• Use a 1.27cm (0.5”) hanging indent for each line after the first in an entry
• Italicise titles of books and other standalone publications
• Enclose titles of essays and other shorter publications in quotation marks
• Capitalise all important words in source titles

There’s also a difference between the two versions of Chicago referencing in terms of how sources are presented. This relates to the position of the date in references.

With the author–date system, the year of publication comes after the author’s name:

Gruen, Lori. 1996. ‘Gendered Knowledge’. In Readings in Animal Cognition, edited by Mark Bekoff and Dale Jamieson, 17-27. Cambridge: MIT Press.

With the footnotes and bibliography version, however, it comes at the end of the reference:

Gruen, Lori. ‘Gendered Knowledge’. In Readings in Animal Cognition, edited by Mark Bekoff and Dale Jamieson, 17-27. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

4. Repeat Citations

With the author–date system, repeat citations of the same source involve giving the same in-text citation each time (although with different page numbers if citing different parts of the text).

With the footnote version, though, there are special rules for repeat citations. Instead of repeating the full source information, you should just give the author’s surname, a shortened version of the title, and page numbers. In practice, this would look something like the following:

1. Lori Gruen, ‘Gendered Knowledge’, in Readings in Animal Cognition, ed. Mark Bekoff and Dale Jamieson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 20.
2. Gruen, ‘Gendered Knowledge’, 18.

This helps keep notes concise and prevents repetition.