Chicago Citation Generator

Free Chicago style citation generator for the 18th edition. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or reference and copy the bibliography entry, full note, and short note.

Paste a source to get a Chicago citation

Chicago citation examples

The same two sources appear on every CiteTools generator page, so you can compare styles side by side.

Journal article

LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. “Deep Learning.” Nature 521, no. 7553 (2015): 436–44. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

Book

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Chicago footnotes

Full note: Yann LeCun et al., “Deep Learning,” Nature 521, no. 7553 (2015): 438, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.
Short note: LeCun et al., “Deep Learning,” 438.

How Chicago formats a bibliography entry

The bibliography entry inverts the first author only and uses full first names: LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton.
Article titles are in quotation marks and title case. Journal and book titles are italic.
For a journal, the volume follows the title with no punctuation, then the issue as no. 7553, the year in parentheses, a colon, and the pages.
Footnotes use the same facts with commas in place of periods, the author in normal order, and the exact page cited.
A note for a work with three or more authors names the first author followed by et al. The bibliography lists up to six authors.
The 18th edition no longer requires the place of publication for books.

Who uses Chicago style

Chicago style comes from The Chicago Manual of Style, published by the University of Chicago Press. History, art history, religion, and publishing rely on its notes and bibliography system: a superscript number in the text points to a footnote or endnote, and a bibliography at the end lists every source alphabetically. The first note for a source is a full note. Later notes for the same source use the short form with the surname, a short title, and the page. CiteTools renders all three forms.

Frequently asked questions

Does it support notes and bibliography or author-date?

Notes and bibliography. CiteTools produces the bibliography entry plus the full and short footnote forms. The author-date system, used mostly in the sciences, is not generated yet.

What changed in the 18th edition?

The main changes for citations: the place of publication is no longer required for books, a note names only the first author plus et al. when a work has three or more authors, and a bibliography entry lists up to six authors before shortening.

Is Turabian the same as Chicago?

Turabian is the student version of Chicago style from the same publisher, and its notes and bibliography entries follow the same patterns. One difference to check: the 9th edition of Turabian follows the 17th edition of Chicago, which still asks for the place of publication in book entries.