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You do not need to cite common knowledge (widely-known, generally-accepted information that is not attributable to one source).
What Needs to be Cited?
- Exact wording taken from any source, including freely available websites
- Paraphrases of passages
- Summaries of another person's work
- Use of another student's work
- Use of your own previous work
Why is Citing Sources Important?
- To give credit to ideas that are not your own
- To provide support for your argument
- To enable your reader to find and read the sources you used
- To avoid infractions
Access Date: The date you first look at a source. Add the access date to the end of citations for all websites except library databases.
Citation: The details about one source you are citing.
Citing: The process of acknowledging the sources of your information and ideas.
In-Text Citation: A brief note in your paper or essay at the point where you use information from a source to indicate where the information came from. An in-text citation should always match more detailed information that is available in the Works Cited List.
Paraphrasing: Taking information that you have read and putting it into your own words.
Plagiarism: Taking the ideas or words of another person and using them as your own.
Quoting: Copying words of text originally published elsewhere. Direct quotations generally appear in quotation marks and end with a citation.
Reference List: Contains details on ALL the sources cited in a text or essay, and supports your research and/or prem
Chicago citation style was created by the University of Chicago. It is commonly used for citing sources in History and occasionally in the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences. Chicago style has two formats:
- The Notes and Bibliography style is preferred by many in humanities disciplines, including history, literature, and the arts. Citations are provided in footnotes or endnotes and are usually accompanied by a bibliography.
- The Author-Date style (in-text citation) is recommended for the physical, natural, and social sciences.sources are cited parenthetically within the text, by author’s last name and year of publication. Each of these citations then match up with an entry in a reference list, where the full bibliographic information is included.
In-text citations - general rules
Chicago Author-Date style features parenthetical author-date in-text citations and a corresponding reference list.
See a sample of in-text citations on the CMOS site.
Basic structure of an in-text citation
- The in-text citation is usually taking one of the following two formats depending on the focus of the writing:
- Author (Date of publication): this format is also called 'author prominent citation'. Use this format when you want to emphasize the author, e.g. Smith and Jones (2016) report that this model has been adopted widely in the last decade.
- (Author surname Date of publication): this format is also called 'information prominent citation'. Use this format when you want to emphasize the information, e.g. this model has been adopted widely in the last decade (Smith and Jones 2016).
- Editors and translators are formatted in the same way as for authors in in-text citations.
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Add the page number to the citation when you including direct quotation, paraphrasing specific information or using secondary sources, e.g.
Reading is "just half of literacy. The other half is writing" (Baron 2013, 194).
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When you mention the author’s name in the sentence, you should remove the author’s name from the citation, e.g.
According to Naomi Baron, reading is "just half of literacy. The other half is writing" (2013, 194).
General rules of in-text citations
Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. This is called a bibliography.
Here are eight quick rules for this list:
- Start a new page for your bibliography (e.g., if your paper is 4 pages long, start your bibliography on page 5).
- Centre the title, Bibliography, at the top of the page. Do not bold or underline it. Look for the alignment option in Word.
- Double-space the list.
- Start the first line of each citation at the left margin; each subsequent line should be indented (also known as a hanging indent.
- Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the citation. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
- For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first name followed by a period.
- Italicize the titles of full works: books, audiovisual material, websites.
- Do not italicize titles of parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document. Instead, use quotation marks.
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If you are adding an appendix to your paper there are a few rules to follow that comply with Chicago guidelines:
- Place tables and other supporting data sets or examples at the end of your paper. Your paper should be numbered Appendix 1, Appendix 2, etc.
- Insert a footnote as you refer to each appendix item and direct the reader to the proper entry, as with a footnote that reads: See Appendix 1.
- A sample Chicago paper from the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University.
- Chicago End-of-Paper checklist
More general rules for the reference list
