Citation, Documentation of Sources

A. That paragraph in CMOS is about crediting words and images borrowed from other sources and incorporated into your own work. Fonts* are in a different category. Any font licensed for public use that you’ve acquired legally can usually be used without credit.

This includes, for example, the fonts from Google Fonts, which can be downloaded for free and used in your publications or other documents without attribution (like Source Serif 4, the font used for the main text on this page); for details, see the Google Fonts FAQ page.

It also includes fonts acquired from Adobe, some of which are free (including the same Source Serif 4 family) and others of which require a Creative Cloud subscription or other type of purchase (see this page on font licensing from Adobe; there are some restrictions, but none of these involve giving credit to Adobe).

Not that you can’t give credit. Printed books often acknowledge fonts and their designers in a colophon, a brief statement (usually at the end) about details related to the book’s production. The one in CMOS can be found at the end of the printed book (and on the page that follows the entries for the letter z in the index at CMOS Online).

__________

* Traditionally speaking, a name like Garamond or Times refers to a typeface, whereas font refers to an assortment of characters for one of these typefaces in a specific size and style (e.g., italic). These days, the shorter word (font) is commonly used for both typeface and font.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. Yes. In fact, it can be more important to cite page numbers when you paraphrase or summarize than when you quote, especially if the source of the info is longer than a few pages. Words reproduced in a verbatim quotation will almost always be easier to locate in the original than words and ideas approximated by paraphrase or summary.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. If a shortened citation is ambiguous, then don’t hesitate to add info that would make it unambiguous. Assuming the title remains the same for each edition of the book you’re citing, all citations after the first can be in shortened form. For example, if you were citing multiple editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, you might have the following footnotes:

1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855). Except as noted otherwise, this and other editions of Leaves of Grass cited herein are from The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, https://whitmanarchive.org/.

2. Leaves of Grass, 1856 ed.

3. Leaves of Grass, 1881–82 ed.

4. Leaves of Grass, 1855 ed.

A shortened note for a book with numbered editions could include the edition number alone or the edition number plus year of publication (after the title or other shortened form): “3rd ed. (1987).”

For the use of italics for the title of The Walt Whitman Archive—which we’re treating as a collected work rather than as a website, though it’s both—see CMOS 14.103. For more on shortened citations, see 13.32–39 and especially 13.37, which includes an example of a title-only citation like the ones in notes 2–4 above.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. Yes, that works well. The only caveat is that if your citations will be linked to their corresponding entries in the reference list (as they are in the HTML versions of the articles in the American Journal of Sociology), then you’ll need to list each lettered year to facilitate separate links.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. According to CMOS 14.183, on laws and statutes,

Federal bills or joint resolutions that have been signed into law—“public laws,” or statutes—are first published separately, as slip laws, and then collected in the annual bound volumes of the United States Statutes at Large (abbreviated in legal style as “Stat.”), where they are referred to as session laws. Later they are incorporated into the United States Code (U.S.C.).

Adapting the suggested citation formats in CMOS, the original 1971 campaign finance law you’re alluding to (enacted in 1972) would be cited as follows (where the slip law is cited ahead of the session law):

Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, Pub. L. No. 92-225, 86 Stat. 3 (1972).

The 1974 amendments would be cited in the same way (regardless of whether you’ve cited the 1971 act), as would the amendments in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002:

Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93-443, 88 Stat. 1263. 

Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, Pub. L. No. 107-155, 116 Stat. 81.

The 1971 law and subsequent amendments can be cited collectively in the United States Code like this:

Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended, 52 U.S.C. §§ 30101–30146.

In case you’re wondering how we got that info, we used Google to find the relevant documents at US government websites. A search for “FECA 1974” led us to the 1974 amendments at Congress.gov, including a scan of the amendments in the Statutes at Large. That’s where we found the title “Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974” (toward the top of the first page) as well as “Public Law 93-443” (abbreviated in our citation). The form “88 Stat. 1263” can be found there also (“1263” is the first page in vol. 88 of the Statutes at Large). A separate search for “BCRA 2002” likewise brought up the relevant text. We located the 1971 act in title 52 of the current US Code (at House.gov) in a similar manner.

Most of Chicago’s advice for citing legal documents (starting at CMOS 14.170) relies on The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, published by the Harvard Law Review Association. Information not found in CMOS can usually be found there.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. In Chicago style, you don’t need to formally cite words written on walls or on labels or cards or elsewhere at an art exhibition. Assuming you’ve supplied full details for the exhibition itself (as in the text or in a note; a bibliography entry is usually unnecessary for live events, though you may list an exhibition catalog there), and assuming also that your text makes it clear that the words are part of that exhibition, you are free to quote section titles and the like without additional citations.

You can also usually discuss specific works of art that are featured in the exhibition without additional citations, as long as you’ve identified these works sufficiently in your text (usually by the name of the creator and a title or description, at the very least). But if you’re a student, check with your instructor, who may expect you to cite individual artworks in your notes or to list them in a bibliography, or both. For examples, see CMOS 14.133. For citing exhibition catalogs, see 14.134. For titles of artworks and exhibitions, see 8.200 and 8.204.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. According to CMOS 13.14, authors don’t need to record DOIs for print resources “unless their publisher or discipline requires it.” And because most readers will assume that a DOI in a citation means you’re referring to something online, it’s generally best not to include one for a work you consulted in print unless you’ve also consulted the online version. (It’s unlikely that a source that’s available only in print will have a DOI.)

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. It’s best not to try to cite separate parts of the same sentence unless it’s perfectly clear what each citation refers to; in your example, we can’t really tell which part is from IMDb and which is from Henry.

But first, there are some other issues that should probably be addressed in your example. We’ve done some digging and determined that your “Henry 1994” almost certainly refers to the following article:

Henry, Matthew. 1994. “The Triumph of Popular Culture: Situation Comedy, Postmodernism and The Simpsons.” Studies in Popular Culture 17 (1): 85–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23413793.

Henry, however, does not seem to use the phrase “Simpsons craze” in that article (or the word “craze” by itself)—not on page 87 or elsewhere. Perhaps you’re drawing on this passage from page 87:

The Simpsons was, therefore, inevitable, the next logical step in the blue-collar tradition; its enormous success, however, was quite unexpected.

If that’s the case, then you shouldn’t put “Simpsons craze” in quotation marks. Some people probably referred to that show’s huge popularity in that way, but your source refers to an “enormous success,” not a craze.

Next, if it’s your own claim that the show’s producers could not have predicted the show’s success (something that Henry’s article doesn’t seem to address either), then you need to make that clear.

As for the identity of the producers, The Simpsons has had such a long run that according to IMDb (on its page for the full cast and crew), it’s had more than 150 producers to date. Moreover, the three people you list are credited at IMDb as the show’s creators, not its producers.

Taking all that into account, here’s one way that you might revise the sentence in your question (assuming you have a reason for introducing the creators at this point and that you’ve established elsewhere that you’re talking about the show’s earliest days):

According to Henry (1994), the show’s “enormous success . . . was quite unexpected.” And though Henry does not mention them, the show’s creators—James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, and Sam Simon (IMDb 2026)—were likely among those taken by surprise.

Make sure that “IMDb 2026” in your reference list includes the link to the main page for the show (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096697/), where the creators are listed. (But note that at IMDb’s page for the full cast and crew, only Groening gets a creator credit; Brooks and Simon are credited, along with Groening, as developers, one more thing you may want to consider when revising your text.)

Finally, if you were to cite two sources at the end of a sentence, you’d usually do that when both sources supported the same idea, in which case you’d separate them with a semicolon: (IMDb 2026; Henry 1994). See also CMOS 13.116.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. Let’s start with an example of how to cite an unpublished letter in a note (adapted from the examples in CMOS 14.127):

1. George Creel to Colonel House, September 25, 1918, box 31, folder 986, Edward Mandell House Papers, Yale University Library.

That’s American journalist George Creel writing to Edward M. House, an American diplomat and adviser, at that time, to President Woodrow Wilson. The example assumes that House has been identified more fully in the text. (See this article on House in Britannica for the form used in the note; “Colonel” was an honorary rather than a military title.)

A letter is similar to a diary entry, and House’s diaries are also included in the same collection at Yale. House’s diary entry from the same day as the letter could be cited as follows (and note that “Colonel House,” the addressee in the letter from Creel, isn’t used in this context):

2. House, diary, September 25, 1918, Edward Mandell House Papers, Yale University Library, original transcript, ser. 2, vol. 6, https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/1748077.

The diary entry, unlike the letter, has been digitized, so we included a URL for the part of the collection where the diary may be found (plus a few more details about the location in the collection). For a diary that isn’t in a public collection, adjust your entry accordingly. Here’s a general-purpose form that can be adapted as needed:

3. So-and-So, diary, February 3, 2026, quoted with the permission of [name of person who owns the diary].

For an alternate date format that may be suitable for works that cite many letters or diary entries, see CMOS 14.122. See also 12.3.

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]

A. If there’s a note number 1, readers may expect to find a note number 2 later in the same document. For that reason, using an asterisk instead of a number can make sense when there’s just one note. But there isn’t any general rule that we know of that says you must do this.

Let’s say, for example, that an academic journal uses author-date style supplemented by numbered notes for substantive comments, and that most articles in that journal include more than one note. It would be reasonable in that case, as a matter of consistency across articles, to assign a number even in the case of only one footnote.

So if you have the option of using an asterisk, consider doing so, but it’s not a requirement. For the answer to a similar question about whether to number a single figure in a document, see this Q&A (which links to the seventeenth edition of CMOS but still applies).

[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]