Citation, Documentation of Sources

A. CMOS does still say that a note reference number¹ is best placed at the end of a sentence or clause,² but there isn’t any limitation—technical or otherwise³—that might prevent authors from placing such a reference⁴ elsewhere, or that might bar authors from using more than one in a sentence.⁵

So if a publisher or editor has failed to enforce the spirit of CMOS⁶ relative to note reference numbers—and the book’s already at the indexing stage⁷—​there’s not much we can do to help you.⁸

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1. Or symbol—*, †, ‡, etc.

2. See CMOS 14.26.

3. A note reference number can literally appear anywhere in a document.

4. Like this one.

5. This sentence has five.

6. See note 2 above.

7. As described in CMOS 16.108.

8. Other than show with this answer how distracting such notes can be. :-)

A. No, you wouldn’t cite the author as both author and editor of the book. For example, “The Girl in the Window” and Other True Tales (University of Chicago Press, 2023) is an anthology of stories written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lane DeGregory that were originally published in the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times).

The title page credits DeGregory as author of the book and Beth Macy as author of a foreword. No other contributor is listed. So even though it was DeGregory herself who compiled, edited, and annotated the stories, you wouldn’t cite her as editor also.

Besides, the words “edited by” don’t have the power to tell the reader that some or all of the essays in a book were previously published. If that info is relevant, you can say so either in the text (as we’ve done near the beginning of this answer) or in a note. But for the citation itself, follow the title page.

A. Cite the content as you normally would, but credit the Wayback Machine and include the URL for the archived page. For example, let’s say you were to mention the fact that Merriam-Webster.com still listed the hyphenated form e-mail in its entry for that term as late as January 2, 2021, with email offered as an equal variant (“or email”). You could cite your evidence in a footnote as follows (see also CMOS 14.233):

1. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “e-mail,” archived January 2, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, https://​web.archive.org​/web​/20210102004146​/https://​www.merriam​-webster​.com​/dictionary​/e-mail.

Notice the URL, an unwieldy double-decker consisting of two consecutive URLs stitched together. If you wanted a shorter URL, you could cite only the second part (i.e., the original URL for the content), as follows:

1. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “e-mail,” https://​www​.merriam​-webster​.com​/dictionary​/e​-mail, archived January 2, 2021, at the Wayback Machine.

That’s a bit more concise than the first example, but readers will need to enter the original URL at the Wayback Machine (which they’ll have to find on their own) and then use the date to get to the right version of the page.

Either approach is acceptable as long as you’re consistent.

A. Yes, you need to add a period after the closing parenthesis, but only if the quotation is presented in line with the rest of the text (as in your question).

For example, you might quote Dorothy asking the Lion (capitalized in the original) not to bite her dog: “Don’t you dare to bite Toto!” (Baum 1900, 67). Note that we’re referring to the original 1900 edition of the L. Frank Baum classic (published by the George M. Hill Company). And note the period after the parenthetical citation.

But if you present the quotation as a block, there’s no period after the source:

“Don’t you dare to bite Toto! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a big beast like you, to bite a poor little dog!”
 “I didn’t bite him,” said the Lion, as he rubbed his nose with his paw where Dorothy had hit it.
 “No, but you tried to,” she retorted. “You are nothing but a big coward.”
 “I know it,” said the Lion, hanging his head in shame; “I’ve always known it. But how can I help it?” (Baum 1900, 67)

See CMOS 13.69 and 13.70, respectively. And don’t forget about search. If you enter the words “source period parentheses” in the search box at CMOS Online, you should get those paragraphs among the top results.

A. When a source citation gets complicated, try adding a description. If the sixteen articles appeared, for example, in an academic journal published in annual volumes with four issues each, you could do this:

1. Author’s Name, “Title of Article,” Name of Journal, vol. 72, no. 1–vol. 75, no. 4 (2016–19); published as a series of sixteen articles under the same title.

Though “vol.” is normally omitted in Chicago-style citations for journal articles, it may be retained as needed for clarity (as in the example above).

Another approach would be to cite the first article, as follows:

1. Author’s Name, “Title of Article,” Name of Journal 72, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/ . . . ; continued as a series of sixteen articles under the same title through vol. 75, no. 4 (2019).

The second option has the advantage of allowing for a DOI for the first article, which should help readers track down that article and, from there, the rest of the series (see also CMOS 14.8).

A. The key word is “under,” and in a book with chapters it’s helpful to add a chapter number in addition to a section title. For example, the EPUB edition of Matthew Shindell’s For the Love of Mars could be cited in a note as follows:

1. Matthew Shindell, For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), chap. 4, under “The Nineteenth-Century Cosmic Epic,” EPUB.

2. Shindell, Mars, chap. 5, under “Mars after Detente.”

But it’s usually better for your readers if you cite specific pages in books (partly because books are so long). If you have the option of consulting a print or PDF edition of a book, do so, and then cite by page number.

A. Cite the book, not the blurb, just as you would for any text that you either quote or paraphrase or otherwise refer to. And tell your readers where in the book to find the blurb, which you could do either in the text or in a note.

For example, you might quote from Simon Winchester’s blurb on the back of the dust jacket of the Ballantine hardcover edition of The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams, and include the following footnote:

1. Simon Winchester, praise for Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words (New York: Ballantine Books, 2021), back of dust jacket.

Winchester’s name and “back of dust jacket” could be omitted if these details are mentioned in the text.

If you instead (or also) quote from the shortened version of Winchester’s blurb that appears in the opening pages of the Ballantine paperback, your footnote might look like this:

2. Simon Winchester, praise for Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words, trade paperback ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2022), third page (unnumbered).

Had the praise pages been counted in the pagination, you would have cited page iii—even if that page didn’t have a page number printed on it. But in the Williams paperback, the first page with a number is page xiv. Counting back from there, we can figure out that the half title is page i. The praise pages begin before that, so they can’t be cited with an actual page number.

Note that the Winchester example is of a blurb, or praise from an individual usually solicited by the author or publisher. Typically, such blurbs appear in first editions, before any reviews have been published; the front matter of a paperback reissue typically includes excerpts from published reviews (the Williams paperback includes both). Either can be referred to as “praise.”

Finally, that statement about the paperback edition in the second footnote above isn’t normally included; usually, only a numbered or revised edition is specified (see CMOS 14.133). But in this context, specifying the paperback edition will be helpful. (We adapted it from the edition statement on the copyright page: “2022 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition.”)

A. Unless you are working for an instructor or publisher who forbids it, a note number may appear anywhere in a sentence. And though it’s usually best for readers not to be interrupted midsentence* by a note number or symbol, the exception you describe seems warranted.

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* The word midsentence—though it’s not listed in Merriam-Webster (as of August 8, 2023)—follows Chicago style for words formed with prefixes (see CMOS 7.89, sec. 4, under “mid”).

A. The Chicago Manual of Style has never required “p.” or “pp.” in source citations. The first edition of the Manual (1906), in a three-page section on footnotes, included the following advice: “Ordinarily, omit ‘Vol.,’ ‘chap.,’ and ‘p.’ in references to particular passages” (¶ 218).

This advice is intended to cut down on clutter and repetition, but it isn’t an outright ban, as the current edition of CMOS (in paragraph 14.151) clarifies:

Where the presence of other numerals threatens ambiguity, p. or pp. may be added for clarity. (And if an author has used p. and pp. consistently throughout a work, there is no need to delete them.)

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with “p.” and “pp.” Besides, when a house style contradicts CMOS, the former generally takes precedence.

A. When CMOS says that something is normally cited in the notes rather than in a bibliography, you can interpret that to mean that you may not need a reference list entry if you’re using author-date style.

Let’s start with this footnote example, adapted from CMOS 14.233:

1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “app (n.),” accessed July 6, 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/249075.

In author-date style, you could work that information into the text. But unless it’s required by your instructor or publisher, you could leave out the URL and access date (which would otherwise be included in parentheses):

In the OED’s online entry for “app.,” the first sense is as an abbreviation for job application (or the like); the second sense refers to the software.

Well-known reference works like the OED don’t usually require detailed citations; the footnote example above is overkill for most types of work. But if you do need a formal author-date entry in a reference list, try this:

OED (Oxford English Dictionary). n.d. Accessed July 6, 2023. https://www.oed.com/.

Then in the text you can refer parenthetically to “(OED, n.d.)” whenever you need to point readers to the reference list entry:

In the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for “app” (OED, n.d.) . . .

For the use of “n.d.” (no date) in author-date references, see CMOS 15.50.