Citation, Documentation of Sources

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.

__________

* 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.

A. Your description would form the basis of a good citation, as in this note:

1. Kim Soo-yong, dir., Mist (Angae), posted July 21, 2014, Korean Classic Film, YouTube, 1 hr., 19 min., https://youtu.be/GppVzuwaK-Y.

But whenever you cite something posted on YouTube, it’s important to consider the source itself in addition to whatever the text on YouTube says about it below the video.

In this case, the film is labeled on YouTube with the title “Mist (Angae),” but the film’s title sequence includes “The Foggy Town,” in English (and not as a subtitle added later on), beneath the Korean title (안개). (“Angae” is a direct transliteration of 안개, which can mean “mist” or “fog.”) That detail about the original English title will help readers who follow the link confirm that they’ve landed in the right place:

Other details include the original release date (1967) and the fact that the film is based on a novel by Kim Seung-ok, who also adapted the screenplay. This information can be worked into the text or added to a note if relevant.

The original title and release date could be included in a note as follows:

1. Kim Soo-yong, dir., The Foggy Town (안개), 1967, posted July 21, 2014, under the title Mist (Angae), Korean Classic Film, YouTube, 1 hr., 19 min., https://youtu.be/GppVzuwaK-Y.

And notice that we’ve used the “share” version of the link in our examples; links shortened through third parties shouldn’t be used in source citations because they hide the original URL (see CMOS 14.10), but YouTube’s own shortened URLs are okay to use.

In sum, you have some flexibility when citing classic content posted to YouTube. But remember to pay attention to the source as the thing you’re primarily citing and describing; YouTube is only the messenger.

A. Some styles allow for more than one note reference at a time, like this.^1,2 But in Chicago style, you should use only one note reference at a time, like this.¹ When a single note needs to cite multiple sources, the sources are usually separated in the note by semicolons. For more information, including examples, see CMOS 14.28 and 14.57.

A. Books that are mentioned in passing and not relied on for substantive information don’t need to be formally cited in a note or bibliography entry. We will try to make this explicit in a future edition of CMOS.

A. According to an article on the website of OpenAI, the organization responsible for DALL·E, “If you’d like to cite DALL·E, we’d recommend including wording such as ‘This image was created with the assistance of DALL·E 2’ or ‘This image was generated with the assistance of AI’ ” (see “How Should I Credit DALL·E in My Work?,” accessed March 7, 2023).

In other words, be sure to give credit to the source, as you would for any image (see CMOS 3.29–37). Here’s an image created by DALL·E 2:

The credit for that image might read as follows (with the prompt used to generate the image in quotation marks):

“A modern office rendered as a cubist painting,” image generated by OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, March 5, 2023.

While we’re on the subject of AI, the OpenAI article linked to above ends with the following statement: “This article was generated with the help of GPT-3.” GPT-3 is the third iteration of the generative language model used in the development of ChatGPT, the chatbot that was released to the public in November 2022.

A. You do need to credit ChatGPT and similar tools whenever you use the text that they generate in your own work. But for most types of writing, you can simply acknowledge the AI tool in your text (e.g., “The following recipe for pizza dough was generated by ChatGPT”).

If you need a more formal citation—for example, for a student paper or for a research article—a numbered footnote or endnote might look like this:

1. Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, March 7, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat.

ChatGPT stands in as “author” of the content, and OpenAI (the company that developed ChatGPT) is the publisher or sponsor, followed by the date the text was generated. After that, the URL tells us where the ChatGPT tool may be found, but because readers can’t necessarily get to the cited content (see below), that URL isn’t an essential element of the citation.

If the prompt hasn’t been included in the text, it can be included in the note:

1. ChatGPT, response to “Explain how to make pizza dough from common household ingredients,” OpenAI, March 7, 2023.

If you’ve edited the AI-generated text, you should say so in the text or at the end of the note (e.g., “edited for style and content”). But you don’t need to say, for example, that you’ve applied smart quotes or adjusted the font; changes like those can be imposed silently (see CMOS 13.7 and 13.8).

If you’re using author-date instead of notes, any information not in the text would be placed in a parenthetical text reference. For example, “(ChatGPT, March 7, 2023).”

But don’t cite ChatGPT in a bibliography or reference list unless you provide a publicly available link (e.g., via a browser extension like ShareGPT or A.I. Archives). Though OpenAI assigns unique URLs to conversations generated from your prompts, those can’t be used by others to access the same content (they require your login credentials), making a ChatGPT conversation like an email, phone, or text conversation—or any other type of personal communication (see CMOS 14.214 and 15.53).

To sum things up, you must credit ChatGPT when you reproduce its words within your own work, but unless you include a publicly available URL, that information should be put in the text or in a note—not in a bibliography or reference list. Other AI-generated text can be cited similarly. Check back with us for updates on this evolving topic.

For some considerations on the use of AI in scholarly publishing and the responsibilities of authors, start with this position statement on authorship and AI tools from COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).

[Editor’s update: Original answer updated to put the publisher before the date and to acknowledge tools like ShareGPT and A.I. Archives.]