To cite a book in your bibliography in Chicago format with the author-date system, follow this basic pattern:
Author's last name, author's first name. Year. Title of Book.
City of publication: Publisher.
All of this information should be available from the book itself. Check the title page and the copyright page if you're not sure where or when it was published.
Use the Hanging Indent format for references that go beyond a single typed line. Use single spacing and double space between entries. The examples below may lose their formatting in this container.
Be sure to cite the edition you're actually looking at. For example:
Austen, Jane. 2006. Sense and Sensibility.
New York: Bantam Classics.
[The book was originally published in London in 1811, but the edition we're looking at was published in New York in 2006.]
Cite as much information about your copy of the book as possible. For example:
Milton, John. 1998. Paradise Lost.
Edited by Alistair Fowler. 2nd ed.
New York: Longman.
[This is an edition of Milton's Paradise Lost that was edited by Fowler.]
If a book has two authors, cite it this way, with the authors alphabetized by last name:
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979.
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
If a book has three authors, cite it this way, with the authors alphabetized by last name:
Croft, W. Bruce, Donald Metzler, and Trevor
Strohman. 2010. Search Engines:
Information Retrieval in Practice.
Boston: Addison-Wesley.
If a book has more than three authors, list all of them. Cite it this way, with the authors alphabetized by last name:
Bloom, Harold, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman,
Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller. 1979.
Deconstruction and Criticism. New
York: Seabury Press.
For your in-text citation, use the first author's name (Bloom et al. 1979, 11)
If a book is a translation, cite it this way:
Flaubert, Gustave. 2010. Madame Bovary:
Provincial Ways. Translated by Lydia
Davis. New York: Viking.
If a book has an editor, cite it this way:
Widmer, Ted, ed. 2006. American Speeches:
Political Oratory from the Revolution
to the Civil War. New York:
Library of America.
A signed entry in a reference book:
Mendelson, Wallace. 1992. "Separation of
Powers." In The Oxford Companion
to the Supreme Court of the United
States, edited by Kermit L. Hall,
774-79. New York: Oxford University
Press.
An unsigned entry in a reference book (note: these are typically included as footnotes or endnotes rather than as bibliography entries):
Statesman's Yearbook 2013, ed. Barry
Turner. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, s.v. "United States
of America."
[note: this example is a citation for the entry "United States of America." "s.v" is short for sub verbo - "under the word."]
Corporate authorship (publications by a group or organization, where an author is not named):
World Bank and United Nations. 2010.
Natural Hazards, UnNatural Disasters:
The Economics of Effective Prevention.
Washington, D.C.: World Bank
Publications. http://0-site.ebrary.com.
libcat.uafs.edu/lib/uafs/docDetail.
action?docID=10430845
[note: I'm including the URL because I read this online]
A book that you read online:
Shaw, George Bernard. 2003. Heartbreak
House. Penn State Electronic
Classics. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/
faculty/jmanis/gbshaw/Heartbreak-
House.pdf
[This is a reformatted e-text of the play.]
Mitchell, Verner D. and Cynthia Davis. 2012.
Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her
Circle, a Biography of the Harlem
Renaissance. New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
ebrary edition. http://0-site.ebrary.
com.libcat.uafs.edu/lib/uafs/
docDetail.action?docID=10535587
[Here I'm including the publication information for this book because the online text is a straight reprint of the print edition, and I'm adding the fact that I read the book online through ebrary.]
To cite a web site, follow this basic format:
Author's last name, author's first name.
Date of publication (or date last
modified). Title of the page.
Publisher or sponsor.
Date of access. URL.
Some of these elements may not be available, but try to include as many as possible:
Gagnon, Pauline. 2013. "The Higgs boson:
One Year on." CERN (European
Organization for Nuclear Research).
Accessed July 10, 2013. http://home.
web.cern.ch/about/updates/2013/07/
higgs-boson-one-year.
Chicago style recommends that you can use discretion about deciding which sources to cite in a bibliography and which can simply be cited in footnotes. If you're writing a paper that already includes footnotes, it may be simpler to use them to document an Internet source and not include a full bibliography entry.
To cite a journal article, the basic format to follow is:
Author's last name, author's first name.
Date. "Title of Article." Title of
Journal volume (issue):pages.
DOI or URL (if you read the article
online through a database).
Petry, Alice Hall. 1989. "Alice Walker:
The Achievement of the Short Fiction."
Modern Language Studies 19 (1):
12-27. http://0-www.jstor.org.libcat.
uafs.edu/stable/3195263.
Mehta, Harish C. 2012. "Fighting,
Negotiating, Laughing: The
Use of Humor in the Vietnam
War." The Historian 74 (4):743-88.
doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.2012.00332.x.
To cite a chapter in an edited book, follow this format:
Author's last name, author's first name.
Date. "Title of Chapter." Title of Book.
Editors. City of publication: Publisher.
Pages. Medium [Print or Online].
Norris, Margot. 1991. "Modernist
Eruptions." In The Columbia
History of the American Novel.
Ed. Emory Elliott, 311-330. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Follow a similar format for an item in an anthology:
Rich, Adrienne. 1993. "Women and Honor:
Some Notes on Lying." In Adrienne
Rich's Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi,
195-203. New York: Norton.
A YouTube video: how you cite one depends on the kind of video it is. If it's a filmed lecture or performance, include whatever information you have about the original event:
Ronell, Avital. 2012. "Awe and
Responsibility" (lecture,
European Graduate School,
Saas-Fee, Switzerland). YouTube
video. 1:06:46. Posted January
29, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=TgF35qoPQ_U.
If information about authorship isn't available, you'll have to be less specific and start with the title of the video instead:
"How to Tie a Full Windsor Knot." 2008.
YouTube video, 2:00, posted by
"Howcast." http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=lji-JeAjT2Y.
A movie:
Title. Year. Directed by (director).
Information about the specific
copy you watched. Format.
Imitation of Life. 1959. Directed by Douglas
Sirk. Universal City, CA: Universal
Studios, 2003, DVD.
A sound recording:
Artist. Year. Title. Performer/conductor
(if necessary). Information about
the specific copy you heard.
Format.
Wagner, Richard. 1979-80. Parsifal.
Performed by the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted
by Herbert von Karajan. Deutsche
Grammophon 413 347-2, 1990.
Compact disc.
An interview:
A published interview can be cited as follows:
Person interviewed. Year.
"Title of Interview." Interviewer.
Source.
Delany, Samuel R. 2011. "Samuel R.
Delany: the Art of Fiction no.
210." By Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah.
Paris Review 197. http://www.
theparisreview.org/interviews/
6088/the-art-of-fiction-no-
210-samuel-r-delany.
An unpublished interview (e.g., one that you conducted yourself) should be cited briefly in parentheses in text - no entry is needed in your bibliography. An e-mail should also be cited this way. Be sure to provide enough information elsewhere in your text that it's clear who you're talking about and why you're citing them:
(Jane Roe, personal communication)