Chicago Manual of Style Author-Date

Chicago-style (CMS) citations follow two formats:

• the notes and bibliography system and
• the author-date system.

It is important to check your assignment guidelines to determine which form of Chicago-style citations your professor wishes you to use. This guide covers the author-date system.

A complete Chicago Author-Date Citation has two parts:

• In-text citation: a parenthetical citation integrated into the sentence or paragraph when quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing. Whether you are quoting, summarizing, or paraphrasing, a page number (when available) is required.
• Reference Entry: a complete bibliographic citation listed alphabetically at the end of the paper in the reference list.

In-text Citations

Basic Parenthetical Citation: (name, publication date, page)

“Thinking is a mental activity that is used to resolve doubt about what to do, what to believe, or what to desire or seek” (Baron 1993, 193).

or

According to Baron (1993), “Thinking is a mental activity that is used to resolve doubt about what to do, what to believe, or what to desire or seek” (193).

Directly quoting with no page numbers (paragraph #)

If there are no page numbers, use the most specific aspect of the text that a reader could use to find the information, which could include a chapter (chap.), volume (vol.), or section heading (under “Title of Section”).

According to Hughes-Warrington (2007), “the figuration of time is an essential, inseparable feature of writing history” (under “Images and Words”).

With two authors

Participants in the study spent more time analyzing arguments that they disagreed with compared to those that they agreed with (Edwards and Smith 1996, 45).

With three or more authors

Only the first author is included with the “et al.” notation.

Although human thinking is not always rational, it can be improved through training (Lilienfeld et al. 2009, 37).

When making a claim that multiple sources support

Consistently list the sources in order of importance, alphabetically, or chronologically.

Numerous researchers have inquired into the different dispositions of critical thinking (Perkins et al. 1993; Ennis 1996; Facione et al. 1994).

Block Quotes

Quotations that are more than 100 words long still include author name, date, and page, but the formatting is slightly different:

• There are no quotation marks around the quotation.
• The period comes before the parenthetical citation.
• The entire quotation is indented from the left margin.

In Chicago, block quotes can also be used for clarity in specific cases. 

Example: 

Researchers have described another way we learn,

one that does not think of learning as the acquisition of something that already exists, but instead sees learning as responding, as a response to a ‘question’.[…] Here learning becomes a creation or an invention, a process of bringing something new into the world: one’s own, unique response. (Biesta 2006, 68)

Reference List

For more information, consult the CMS website. 

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