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Citation

Sample Citation: Chicago

Sample Citation for Works Referenced List: Chicago Author/Date

James, Marlon. 2015. A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel. New York: Riverhead Books.

Sample Citation for Bibliography: Chicago Notes/Bibliography

James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel. New York: Riverhead Books. 2015.

Sample Citations from Real Questions: Chicago Notes/Bibliography

Citing an article found in one of our library databases

Citing an article found in the database Art Full Text, copy the Chicago/Turabian citation, and it looks like this:

“Massive Project.” Creative Review 23, no. 3 (March 2003): 20–22. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=505050930&authtype=shib&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Note that when one uses the above link, you get to a page that requires you to find your institution and and log in. If your reader doesn't have access to the specific database the article came from, they won't get access.

There is a permalink in the database record ( http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=505050930&authtype=shib&site=ehost-live&scope=site&custid=s8408921&authtype=ip,shib) but you have to choose it separately and anyone who is NOT a Macalester student, faculty, or staff person wouldn't be able to access the resource using your link. This is not a good citation practice for a paper because your reader will be frustrated by links that don't work for them, and a good rule is to not annoy your reader.

A better way to cite this using CMOS notes/bibliography style would be:

“Massive Project.” Creative Review 23, no. 3 (March 2003): 20–22. Art Full Text.

You want to use the specific database name (Art Full Text), not the platform name (EbscoHost). This allows your reader to know the specific article you read from the particular journal, and also the database, or index, in which you found it. If you consulted the journal in print, you would not need to include the database information. The reason to include it is that sometimes there can be variations in editions, particularly for newspapers, and not all databases index the same editions of a periodical. 

Further, note that the above citation generated by the database is the version that would be in the bibliography, not the note. So, for a fuller example, see below:

Notes:

  1. “Massive Project,” Creative Review 23, no. 3 (March 2003), 21, Art Full Text. 

  2. "Massive Project," 22.

Bibliography:

“Massive Project.” Creative Review 23, no. 3 (March 2003): 20–22. Art Full Text.

In the bibliography, the commas found in the note are replaced with periods, and you include the full range of pagination for the article rather than the specific pages found in the notes. The format for subsequent citations to the same work when made consecutively used to be to use ibid. CMOS has changed over time to prefer shortened citations but you'll still see ibid., sometimes.

Citing online media

University of Chicago Press' Manual of Style has an extensive FAQ that addresses many unusual situations. Here's a reference on citing YouTube videos generally. There are links from that response to their guidelines for citing multimedia more broadly. In general, when citing online multimedia sources, you can lean on the elements for citing multimedia, web site content, and social media. Here are other references to the CMOS guidelines for music recordings and other guidelines they provide for deciding what makes sense to include.

Here's an example following Chicago notes/bibliography, using a YouTube video of a Massive Attack song, posted by a concert attendee (not Massive Attack). 

Notes:

1. Massive Attack, Dissolved Girl, recorded September 10, 2019 at the Palace Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota by danflath, YouTube video, 7:06, https://youtu.be/GktacwI_kAU.

2. Massive Attack, Dissolved Girl

Bibliography:

Massive Attack. Dissolved Girl. Recorded September 10, 2019 at the Palace Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota by danflath, YouTube video, 7:06. https://youtu.be/GktacwI_kAU.

Include specific time stamp references in the text of your paper, if you wanted to point your reader to a specific moment in the video, or add such information for a still, for example, in the image caption. You could also add it as part of your footnote, as commentary:

1. Massive Attack, Dissolved Girl, recorded September 10, 2019 at the Palace Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota by danflath, YouTube video, 7:06, https://youtu.be/GktacwI_kAU. Still image captured at 4:06.

Addressing several citations to the same source

Q: "For Chicago Manual Style, using footnotes, how do I cite different page numbers within the context of the introduction and the first chapter? Am I supposed to continually cite the book, just with different page numbers? Like if my citation is number 1 for the footnotes, do I have multiple different citations for different page numbers or just cite them all to that one citation?"

A: There are a couple of different ways to approach this. One is to tweak your writing style so that you have fewer separate citations. This is usually done by improving your paraphrasing and avoiding direct quotations, and making it clear to your reader. For example, if you're using Chicago notes/bibliography, you might reference a range of pages in your footnotes:

Notes:

1 Nongbri, Brent, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2013), 4. 

2 Nongbri, Before Religion, 5-7.

Bibliography:

Nongbri, Brent. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bqx9.

(Note that the copy/paste bibliography citation provided by JSTOR incorrectly puts the author's name in all capital letters and leaves off the place of publication from the citation, requiring editing.)

There's a section in the Chicago Manual of Style that discusses various remedies for excessive annotations (sections14:56-14:60). One of the sections addresses this by using in-text citations, and provides an example that incorporates a note for when you are frequently referencing the same source(s).

Another could be to use a footnote itself to provide necessary background and avoid doing it in the text of your paper itself, using the footnote as a rhetorical device.