Citation, Documentation of Sources

A. Though there’s a risk that the additional years might be misread as page numbers (at least initially), your first approach is preferred for its brevity. But if page numbers are also cited, use semicolons instead of commas: (Sutinen 1969; 1976, 257; 1981). See CMOS 15.30 for more details and examples.

A. Let’s say you mention the third episode of the second season of the American version of The Office, and you add a note citing that episode. Here’s what that note might look like:

1. The Office, season 2, episode 3, “Office Olympics,” written by Michael Schur, directed by Paul Feig, aired October 4, 2005, on NBC.

After that, the episode could be mentioned in the text again without a note. But if you did want to add a note—for example, to cite a specific moment in the episode—you could do this:

2. “Office Olympics,” at 18 min., 5 sec.

Or you could use the series title (a good strategy when the episodes are untitled, or when the episode titles aren’t meaningful):

2. The Office, S2E3, at 18 min., 5 sec.

Either version of the shortened note tells readers that whatever you’ve quoted or described in the text begins eighteen minutes, five seconds into the third episode of the second season of The Office.

All this assumes you need a note in the first place. TV shows aren’t like books and other written documents, and readers aren’t usually expected to consult them for themselves. Even in a book about American office culture, the following information in the text wouldn’t always need a note:

Work as play is also the theme in “Office Olympics,” the third episode from the second season of NBC’s The Office, . . .

That’s enough information in most contexts to understand the source of the information—no note required.

A. Normally, the cited form of a book publisher’s name should match what appears on the title page. A brief survey of books published since the 1990s suggests that “New York University Press” is how that publisher presents its name on its title pages. Here’s how it appears at the bottom of the title page in a 2022 book by Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou:

That book would be cited in a bibliography as follows:

Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Myria Georgiou. The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power. New York: New York University Press, 2022.

And though “NYU Press” would be fine for mentions in the text—after all, that’s how that press brands itself at its website—it’s usually best in source citations to record a publisher’s name as it appears in the source itself. But you don’t always need to use every word. Books published by the MIT Press include an initial “The” in the publisher’s name, as at the bottom of the title page in Gender(s), a book from 2021 by Kathryn Bond Stockton:

Chicago would omit the The and style the citation as follows:

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Gender(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.

In sum, follow the title page, within reason. And rather than automatically spelling out a publisher’s name if you find it abbreviated in a source citation, it’s usually best to check what the source itself has.

A. We like your second suggestion:

Smith, Jarell. Forthcoming-a. Title of First Work. City: Publisher.

Smith, Jarell. Forthcoming-b. Title of Second Work. City: Publisher.

These would then be cited in the text as (Smith, forthcoming-a) and (Smith, forthcoming-b). Normally there’s no comma between the author’s name and the date of publication in Chicago style—(Smith 2022a)—but we do make an exception in this case (as noted in CMOS 15.45).

A. Use the name of the journal when the article was published. For example,

Todd, Alexander. “Nucleic Acids and Their Role in Future Chemotherapy of Tumours and Virus Diseases.” British Medical Journal 2, no. 5151 (1959): 517–22.

If you want to signal to readers that the journal now uses a different name, mention that fact in your text or in a note—or add a bracketed clarification to your citation as follows:

Todd, Alexander. “Nucleic Acids and Their Role in Future Chemotherapy of Tumours and Virus Diseases.” British Medical Journal [now BMJ] 2, no. 5151 (1959): 517–22.

A. In most contexts, it’s enough simply to mention the bio in the text. Twitter bios are subject to change without notice, so add a date:

As of August 1, 2022, Mindy Kaling’s Twitter bio (@mindykaling) consisted of just two words: “new money.”

If you are expected (as for a school paper) to include a more formal citation, it may be styled as follows (as in a footnote):

1. Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling), “new money,” Twitter bio, accessed August 1, 2022, https://twitter.com/mindykaling.

Note, however, that a Twitter bio isn’t worth adding to a bibliography; a tweet, however, might be, as some will consist of an extended thread that approaches the level of a news article or blog post. For more details and an example, see CMOS 14.209.

A. In your first example, it seems clear that pages 370 and 381 belong, like pages 354 and 355, to volume 2. Not only is it unlikely that they’d instead be taken to belong to volume 1, but repeating the volume numbers (as in your second example) doesn’t seem to make the citation any easier to read. The same principle would apply to citing consecutive page locations from the same volume in a note. (We’ve made a note to consider adding some examples of these scenarios to a future edition of CMOS.)

A. Not usually. In a work with footnotes or endnotes but no bibliography, for example, you could give the full details for the book the first time it’s cited in a note but shorten them thereafter:

1. Hilton Als, “Homecoming,” in Best American Essays 2021, ed. Kathryn Schulz (Boston: Mariner Books, 2021), 11.

2. Als, “Homecoming,” 15–16.

3. Beth Nguyen, “Apparent,” in Schulz, Best American Essays 2021, 155.

In a work that also has a full bibliography, you could use a shortened citation to refer to the book in the notes even the first time one of its essays is cited. Here’s what the bibliography entry would look like (and note the optional info for the series editor; see also CMOS 14.123):

Schulz, Kathryn, ed. Best American Essays 2021. Series edited by Robert Atwan. Boston: Mariner Books, 2021.

Readers who come across the shortened reference to Schulz, Best American Essays 2021, could consult the bibliography if they needed more details; if there’s no bibliography, they’ll have to track down the initial note (the one with the full details). In either case, the shortened citation gives readers who are in a hurry enough info to locate the source (e.g., via Google or a library).

And though you’re not obligated to cite the individual chapters directly in the bibliography, you could do so using a similar approach. For example, to cite the Als essay—assuming the book is listed in full under Schulz (as shown above)—you could do this:

Als, Hilton. “Homecoming.” In Schulz, Best American Essays 2021, 9–21.

If Schulz is not listed also, you would need to add the full details:

Als, Hilton. “Homecoming.” In Best American Essays 2021, edited by Kathryn Schulz, 9–21. Series edited by Robert Atwan. Boston: Mariner Books, 2021.

A. To cite an article in a journal that assigns article numbers (also known as citation IDs) in lieu of page numbers—a system that allows for continuous publication of articles independent of a numbered and paginated journal issue—use the number in place of the page range:

Jansuwan, Para, and Kerstin K. Zander. 2022. “Multifunctional Farming as Successful Pathway for the Next Generation of Thai Farmers.” PLOS ONE 17(4): e0267351. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1371​/journal​.pone​.0267351.

The number for that article is e0267351. If you need to cite a specific page number in the article, many online-only journals (including PLOS ONE) offer a PDF version in addition to (and sometimes instead of) the full-text HTML. The PDF is typically paginated—but starting over at page 1 for each article. You’d cite something on page 8 like this:

(Jansuwan and Zander 2022, 8)

For more details, see CMOS 1.82 and 14.174.

A. The word folio in the context of book pages refers to the leaf of paper, including both sides, so you’re right that “fol. 1r–v” would make sense. But folio can also mean “page,” so “fols. 1r–v” could also make sense. If we had to side with one, however, it would be the singular. The plural would then be reserved for multiple leaves:

fol. 1r (the recto of folio 1, or one page)

fol. 1r–v (the recto and verso of folio 1, or two pages)

fols. 1r–2v (the recto and verso sides of folios 1 and 2, or four pages)

For an example of this usage, see the annotations for this ninth-century parchment manuscript at the Bodleian Library. And though you’ve found examples out there that depart from this usage, a Google search comparing “fol. 1r–v” with “fols. 1r–v” (and the like, with 2r–v, 3r–v, etc.) suggests that the singular is significantly more common.