Chicago Citation Generator

What this tool does

This generator builds Chicago-style references following The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition (2017) — the citation format expected by most humanities and many social-science journals, plus US academic book publishers. Pick the subsystem (Notes-Bibliography or Author-Date), choose a source type, fill in the bibliographic fields, and the tool emits a copy-ready entry plus a sample in-text citation matched to the subsystem you picked.

Everything runs on your device. Nothing you type is uploaded.

Notes-Bibliography vs Author-Date — pick by discipline

Chicago is unusual among style guides because it ships two complete, incompatible citation systems under one cover. You choose one for the whole document.

Notes-Bibliography (NB) is the humanities subsystem. History, literature, art history, philosophy, religious studies, classics, and musicology overwhelmingly use NB. Inline citations are footnotes or endnotes — a superscript number in the body text, then a numbered note at the foot of the page or the end of the chapter. The first note for each source carries the full citation; subsequent notes shorten to “Family, Short Title, page”. A separate alphabetical bibliography at the back of the document lists every source cited.

Author-Date is the sciences subsystem. Sociology, anthropology, economics, business, psychology, and the physical sciences use Author-Date when they use Chicago at all. Inline citations are parenthetical: (Smith 2020, 47). A reference list — alphabetical by author surname — sits at the back. There are no footnotes for sources; footnotes (if any) are reserved for substantive commentary that does not fit in the main text.

The two subsystems share most fields but differ in author formatting at the start of the entry, year placement, and a few punctuation details. Switching the segmented control above shows the difference live.

Worked examples

Notes-Bibliography — a book:

Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

Author-Date — the same book:

Foner, Eric. 2010. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton.

Notes-Bibliography — a journal article:

Chen, Robert. “Reconstruction Memory in the Reconstruction Era.” American Historical Review 128, no. 3 (2023): 412-438.

Author-Date — a website:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2024. “Influenza Surveillance.” CDC.gov. Accessed May 21, 2026. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/.

Common Chicago mistakes

Using NB in a sociology paper (or Author-Date in a history paper). The subsystem is dictated by discipline. A sociology journal will reject NB on sight; a history journal expects NB and gets confused by parenthetical citations. Read the submission guide before you start formatting.

Mixing footnotes and parentheticals. Chicago does not allow this. Within one document, every source citation goes in the same place — the note or the parenthesis — never both. Substantive footnotes (commentary on the text) are still allowed in Author-Date papers; just do not use them for citing sources.

Forgetting “and” before the last author in NB. Notes-Bibliography uses “Author1, Author2, and Author3” with the Oxford comma. Author-Date in this generator follows the same form. For 10+ authors, list the first seven then “et al.” (with the period).

Inconsistent shortened-title form. In NB, the first footnote gives the full citation; subsequent notes use a shortened form: “Family, Short Title, page.” Pick a short title and use it consistently — do not use different abbreviations on different pages.

Headline-style title capitalisation for headings, sentence-style for titles you’re quoting. Chicago capitalises book and article titles headline-style (major words capitalised). Some social-science journals override this with sentence-style for article titles; if your target journal does, override the output before submitting.

Chicago vs Turabian

Turabian is Chicago for students. The citation forms are identical — this generator works for both. Turabian additionally specifies thesis formatting conventions (margins, heading hierarchy, table layout) that sit outside any citation tool. If your style sheet says “Turabian Notes-Bibliography”, use NB here and you are correct on the citation side; check the Turabian manual for the layout details.

Privacy

Reference text is built by JavaScript string formatting running locally on your device. No fetch calls, no analytics on the values you enter, no server-side logging.