Citation, Documentation of Sources

A. In the bibliography, cite the work as it was published; to help readers find both versions of the same name, you can include cross-references from one form to the other. For example, if you were to cite a book and an article by Hillary Clinton, you might include the following entries:

Under C:

Clinton, Hillary Rodham. It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Clinton, Hillary Rodham. See also Rodham, Hillary.

Under R:

Rodham, Hillary. “Children under the Law.” Harvard Educational Review 43, no. 4 (1973): 487–514.

Rodham, Hillary. See also Clinton, Hillary Rodham.

That’s the form for a bibliography. In a note that cites the earlier source, you could clarify for readers (parenthetically or otherwise) that it was published under the name Hillary Rodham.

A. Whether it’s a book from the 1970s or a post on social media, sources are generally cited as published. For books, that means recording the publisher’s name as listed on the title page, even if that name has changed or no longer exists. But when you cite an older tweet, the URL in the citation will direct readers to that same tweet (if it hasn’t been deleted) but on what is now called X (and whether the domain is twitter.com or x.com).

To make the situation clear even for readers who may not be aware of the change, add “now X” in parentheses after “Twitter” in your source citation: “. . . Twitter (now X) . . .” A post published after the name change would be cited as having been published on X (no need to add “formerly Twitter”).

A. Though it’s nice when a footnote gives credit explicitly to one or more creators, the primary purpose of a source citation is to identify—concisely and unambiguously—the source of a quotation or other idea that is not your own. The responsibility for crediting the contributors to such a source lies with the source itself (as on the title page of a book or at the head of an article—or in a credit line that accompanies an illustration).

As you suggest, you can always name additional contributors if you want to. But unless the work of a particular illustrator or other contributor is essential to your reason for having consulted and cited the source—in which case the best place to give credit may be in the text rather than in a source citation—it’s usually best to stick to the basic citation format. Unnamed contributors, including anyone obscured behind et al. (“and others”), will simply have to take comfort in the fact that a source they’ve contributed to has been cited (and, one would hope, consulted).

(The forthcoming 18th edition of CMOS will include an example of how to credit an illustrator in addition to an author in a source citation.)

A. As the text introducing the document at the United Nations website says, “The Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations.”

Accordingly, and with a little more digging at the UN site, we’d cite the document as follows (in a note):

1. UN General Assembly, Resolution 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217(III) (December 10, 1948), https://​www​.un​.org​/en​/about-us​/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.

The identifier “A/RES/217(III)” comes from the information provided by the UN General Assembly Resolutions Tables (3rd session, 1948–49) and locates the UDHR within the text of Resolution 217 (III), the International Bill of Human Rights (to which the UN text quoted above links directly). If “Resolution 217A (III)” is mentioned in the text, it need not also appear in the note. See CMOS 14.305 for more details and examples.

A. Most publishers would say to include source citations in your word count. Publishers use the word count to estimate how much time to allot for editing and how much space will be required in print or PDF. But if you’re an author, make sure to check with your publisher just in case.

If you’re a student, your instructor may have a preference. Otherwise, count everything. In Microsoft Word, the Word Count feature is under the Review tab; make sure to check the box next to “Includes textboxes, footnotes and endnotes” in the Word Count dialog box (if it isn’t checked already).

If you’re using Google Docs, that program ignores words in footnotes, but you can use Docs to download the document in a format that will allow you to count all the words, including MS Word (.docx). If you don’t have Word, you could try LibreOffice Writer, a free program that can open Word docs and that will count footnotes and endnotes; Writer comes in versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Or download your document as plain text (.txt) and open it in a program like Notepad++, the free and open-source Windows-only text editor (word count is under View > Summary).

A. Quotation marks within an article title are normally retained when that title is mentioned or cited. For example, you might refer to the New Yorker article by Lauren Michele Jackson that was published online on March 26, 2024, with the following title:

We’d refer to this title by putting the whole thing in double quotation marks: “Percival Everett’s Philosophical Reply to ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ ”

Note that we’ve made two adjustments in our version of the title: (1) the all caps of the original have been changed to initial caps according to the rules outlined in CMOS 8.159, and (2) the double quotation marks, which follow New Yorker style for setting off the title of a novel (where Chicago specifies italics), have been changed to single—but we didn’t delete them.

And in some cases, quotation marks are added to a title within a title—even for titles of books and movies and the like, which would normally get italics in Chicago style. For example, a title page in a book might read as follows:

Title of a Book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet

But when mentioning or citing this title, we’d do this (see CMOS 14.94):

Title of a Book on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”

In sum, don’t assume quotation marks are always wrong for the title of a book or the like, even in Chicago style. See also CMOS 6.11.

A. Generally speaking, a bibliography and a reference list are the same thing: a list of sources that appears at the end of an article or a book or at the end of a chapter or other component in a book or other work.

But we reserve the term reference list for sources that have been cited using Chicago’s author-date style; each source in a reference list corresponds to at least one parenthetical reference in the text.

Text (parenthetical citation plus page number):

The study concluded that the example was nonliteral, or “for illustration only” (Smith 2024, 33).

Reference list entry (note the position of the date):

Smith, Emily. 2024. A Mock Guide to Invented Prose. City, ST: Big Name University Press.

Sources listed in a bibliography are like the sources in a reference list, but they’re in notes-bibliography style, not author-date.

Bibliography entry (again, note the position of the date):

Smith, Emily. A Mock Guide to Invented Prose. City, ST: Big Name University Press, 2024.

The text will typically cite that same source in a footnote or endnote (or in the text itself). If the citation is in shortened form, readers can consult the alphabetically arranged bibliography for the full form of the citation.

Text and note:

The study concluded that the example was nonliteral, or “for illustration purposes only.”¹

1. Smith, A Mock Guide, 33.

Another difference is that bibliographies may list sources that haven’t been directly cited in the text; conversely, sources cited in the text don’t always need to be included in a bibliography. For more details on this subject, see chapters 14 and 15, starting with paragraph 14.2.

A. Though it does look kind of odd, that 1992 followed by an en dash and a period is Chicago style for citing the date of an unfinished project; see CMOS 6.79. And according to the project’s publisher (as of March 5, 2024), volume 7 is only the latest in what is projected to be a fourteen-volume collection of King’s papers; see “King Papers Publications” at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute (via Stanford University).

Note that Chicago style doesn’t require a comma before “Jr.,” but we retain one in the project title and the name of the institute to reflect the publisher’s usage. Note also that the citation in the question can be reordered to put the collection before the individual volume, in which case only the year for the volume would be cited (as in the first example at CMOS 14.119).

A. According to CMOS 14.111, letters and other correspondence found in published collections are usually cited by the names of the correspondents (sender first), the date of the correspondence (plus a place if relevant), and the information for the collection. Adapting this advice to your example—after clicking around the site to find out more about the source—we’d cite the memo in a note like this:

1. Henry Kissinger to Richard Nixon, memorandum, Washington, December 18, 1970, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, ed. Adam Howard, vol. 21, Chile, 1969–1973, ed. James McElveen and James Siekmeier (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2014), doc. 190, https://​history​.state​.gov​/historical​documents​/frus1969​-76v21​/d190.

See also CMOS 14.120. (And note that the US Government Printing Office became the Government Publishing Office in 2014, but the former name is the one on the vol. 21 title page; see the PDF version based on the original printed edition and offered along with the source.) The same item could be cited again in shortened form like this:

2. Kissinger to Nixon, Washington, December 18, 1970.

The collection and volume (but not usually the individual document) would be added to the bibliography as follows:

Howard, Adam, ed. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976. Vol. 21, Chile, 1969–1973, edited by James McElveen and James Siekmeier. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2014. https://​history​.state​.gov/historical​documents​/frus1969​-76v21/.

Alternatively, you could cite the memo like an article on a website, using the title supplied by the publisher that appears in both the collection and on the web page for the document:

1. “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon,” doc. 190, December 18, 1970, Department of State, Foreign Service Institute, Office of the Historian, https://​history​.state​.gov​/historical​documents/frus1969​-76v21/d190.

Any bibliography entry corresponding to that note would be listed under the name of the organization, and it would make more sense in this case to cite the memo rather than the collection:

US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute. “Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon.” Office of the Historian, doc. 190, December 18, 1970. https://​history​.state​.gov/historical​documents​/frus1969​-76v21/d190.

Citing the memo like an article is a little easier to do, but citing it in terms of the collection adds helpful context. You have some flexibility when it comes to primary sources like these. Note, for example, how editors McElveen and Siekmeier cite the memo (in their source note at the head of the document): as an artifact in a numbered box at the National Archives—or the primary source as it exists in real life.

A. Any site that could be accessed by anyone can usually be cited without comment. For example, you might use a footnote to cite an article on the piano at Grove Music Online:

1. Grove Music Online, “Piano [pianoforte; fortepiano],” by Cynthia Adams Hoover and Edwin M. Good, January 31, 2014, https://​doi​.org​/10​.1093​/gmo​/9781561592630​.article​.A2257895.

That URL is based on a DOI, a persistent identifier designed to return information about a source even when full access is denied. In this case, access will be denied to anyone who doesn’t have a subscription to Grove Music Online or who isn’t logging in at a library or other institution with a subscription:

If you want readers to know that the page wasn’t freely available at the time you cited it, you can add “(requires subscription)” after the URL. But there’s no need to add anything unless the page is entirely unavailable to the public, via subscription or otherwise (see CMOS 14.207 for an example).