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Paste a DOI, URL, or ISBN. Get back a clean reference in Chicago style — notes-bibliography for humanities, author-date for social sciences. Footnote and bibliography entry, or author-date in-text and reference-list entry. Free, no signup.
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The Chicago Manual of Style has been the working reference for editors and publishers since 1906. The current edition is the 17th (2017), with the 18th expected soon. Chicago supports two distinct systems: notes-bibliography (footnotes plus a bibliography), used widely in history, literature, philosophy, theology, and the arts; and author-date (parenthetical citations plus a reference list), used in some social-science and natural-science work. The generator handles both. Pick the one your discipline or instructor specifies.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985.
Chicago notes-bibliography uses numbered footnotes (or endnotes), each with full bibliographic detail on first reference and a short form on subsequent references. Author-date uses parenthetical (Author Year, Page) — note the comma before the page number, which differs from APA's format. Both systems pair with their own reference-list or bibliography format on the back end.
Footnote: 1. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985), 142.
Bibliography entries (notes-bibliography) and reference-list entries (author-date) both hang-indent and list the author last-name-first. Titles of books and journals stay italicized; article and chapter titles use quotation marks. Notes-bibliography puts the publication date near the end of the book entry. Author-date puts the year right after the author's name. The publisher's city stays in for books — Chicago hasn't dropped it the way APA 7 did.
(Atwood 1985, 142), not (Atwood 1985 142).Each input goes through the right source. DOIs hit Crossref directly, since that's where they're registered. ISBNs resolve through library and publisher records. URLs get scraped for embedded metadata (DOI in the source, OG tags, schema.org). If nothing's there, we fall back to Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Once the canonical record lands, the CSL engine renders the citation in Chicago. That's the same engine Zotero and Mendeley run, the same one behind most journal submission portals.
Depends on your discipline. Humanities (history, literature, philosophy, theology, art history) almost always use notes-bibliography. Social sciences and natural sciences that want a Chicago variant usually pick author-date. Check your syllabus or journal submission guide — they'll specify.
First citation gets the full bibliographic entry as a footnote, with the author's first name first ("Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale..."). Subsequent references use a short form: surname, shortened title, page number. The bibliography at the end of the paper lists every cited work alphabetically by author surname.
Effectively yes. Turabian is Kate Turabian's student-paper adaptation of Chicago, simplified for term papers and theses. The rules are nearly identical — the generator's Chicago output works for Turabian assignments too.
Chicago 17 (2017) advises against it. Use a short-form repeat citation instead: Atwood, Handmaid's Tale, 142. Some instructors still accept ibid. — check the assignment guidelines.
Include the DOI as https://doi.org/10.xxxx when available. Otherwise include the URL. Chicago doesn't require an access date for most online sources unless content is likely to change.
Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (2017). The CSL engine that drives the generator is updated regularly, so when Chicago 18 lands the output will follow it.
The full Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, ACS, IEEE, Vancouver, and the 10,000+ other styles in the CSL registry.
Already wrote your references in another style? Drop the list into the Citation Converter to reformat the whole bibliography in one click.
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Have a sentence but no citation? The Find Source tool searches Crossref, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, OpenAlex, and PubMed for supporting peer-reviewed papers.
Save every Chicago citation you generate to your Works Cited library, then export the finished list to Word, BibTeX, or RIS.
Run the final draft through the Writing Assistant to check grammar, clarity, and academic tone before submitting.