Chicago Referencing – How to Cite a Journal Article

Chicago is more famous for deep-dish pizza than influencing stylistic conventions in the human and social sciences. But that would be to ignore The Chicago Manual of Style and the rules it sets out for citing sources. This is a vital skill and, unlike other referencing styles, Chicago referencing gives you a choice between author–date citations and a ‘notes and bibliography’ system. In this post, we explain how to cite a journal article using both versions.

Author–Date Citations

This system uses parenthetical citations to reference sources in the main text of your work. The information required for a journal article is the author surname and year of publication, along with relevant page numbers if quoting directly:

Much has been written about Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Bernstein 2013, 131).

If the author is already named in the text, there’s no need to duplicate this detail in the citation.

All sources cited should also be added to a reference list at the end of your document. The information required here is:

Surname, First Name. Year of Publication. ‘Title’. Journal Name Volume, Issue Number: Page Range.

The Bernstein article above, for instance, would appear as:

Bernstein, Richard. 2013. ‘Ricoeur’s Freud’. Ricoeur Studies 4, no. 1: 130–9.

Note that you should reverse the names of the first author listed for each entry in the reference list so sources can be sorted alphabetically by author surname.

Notes and Bibliography

This approach places source information in footnotes, indicated using superscript numbers (e.g. ¹, ², ³).

The first time you cite a journal article, the footnote should include full publication information, along with relevant page numbers if quoting directly:

^n. Author Name(s), ‘Title’, Journal Name Volume, Issue (Year of Publication): Page Numbers.

It’s worth checking your style guide if you’re citing an online article, as some institutions also require a URL and date of access for electronic sources.

The first footnote for an online version of a journal article would therefore appear as:

^1. Daniel Majdiak and Brian Wilkie, ‘Blake and Freud: Poetry and Depth Psychology’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 6, no. 3 (1972): 87. Accessed 17 March 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331395.

This is quite a lot of information, so you can shorten repeat citations of the same source to just the author’s surname, a shortened title and page numbers:

^2. Majdiak and Wilkie, ‘Blake and Freud’, 92–3.

You should then add all cited sources to a bibliography, listed alphabetically by surname (as above, only reverse names for the first listed author). The information required here is similar to the first footnote, but with slightly different punctuation and the full page range of the article:

Majdiak, Daniel and Brian Wilkie. ‘Blake and Freud: Poetry and Depth Psychology’. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 6, no. 3 (1972): 87–98. Accessed 17 March, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331395.