When you write a history paper, a philosophy essay, a musicology thesis, or a literary study in certain academic traditions, you will likely encounter a documentation system that looks different from the MLA and APA formats covered in the previous two chapters. That system is Chicago style, and it has been shaping scholarly writing in the humanities for well over a century.

Chicago style takes its name from The Chicago Manual of Style, a comprehensive guide to writing, editing, and publishing first issued by the University of Chicago Press in 1906. Today it stands as one of the most authoritative style references in the English-speaking world. Unlike MLA, which places brief parenthetical citations in the text, or APA, which centers author names and publication dates, Chicago style offers writers two distinct documentation systems: one built around footnotes and endnotes paired with a bibliography, and another built around in-text author-date citations paired with a reference list. Each system suits a different type of scholarly work.

This chapter introduces both systems, explains when and why each is used, and walks you through the most common citation formats you will need as a student writer. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to format a Chicago-style paper with confidence, document sources correctly, and understand why Chicago's particular conventions reflect the values of the disciplines that rely on it.

Chicago style was not invented to make students' lives difficult. It was developed over many decades by editors, scholars, and publishers who needed a consistent, reliable system for producing academic and professional texts. The Chicago Manual of Style began as a small style sheet used by University of Chicago Press printers in the early twentieth century. Over more than a hundred years of revision and expansion, it grew into a comprehensive handbook that addresses not only citation but also grammar, punctuation, capitalization, table formatting, indexing, and the full range of editorial decisions that go into a scholarly publication.

The manual is currently in its seventeenth edition, and while students rarely need to read it cover to cover, understanding what it represents helps explain why Chicago formatting feels thorough and detailed. Chicago style was designed for professional publication. When you learn to use it, you are learning the same system that historians, philosophers, literary scholars, musicologists, art historians, and many other humanities researchers use when they submit work to journals, presses, and archives.

That professional heritage matters in a practical way. Chicago style assumes that readers want to trace your sources fully, not just glance at an author's name and year. It gives readers rich bibliographic information and, in the notes-bibliography version, allows writers to add explanatory comments directly to citations without interrupting the flow of the text. This flexibility makes Chicago style especially well suited to humanities research, where a single footnote might acknowledge a contested interpretation, point the reader toward a related argument, or explain why one source was used rather than another.

Not every subject uses Chicago style. As you move through your academic career at MGU and beyond, you will encounter different documentation systems depending on the discipline you are writing in. The patterns below are consistent enough to serve as reliable guidelines, though individual instructors and publications always have the final word on which system is required.

Chicago style offers two complete and independent documentation systems. They are not variations of each other; they are genuinely different approaches to the problem of giving credit and helping readers locate sources.

Notes-bibliography style uses superscript numbers in the text that correspond to numbered notes at the bottom of the page (footnotes) or at the end of the paper (endnotes). Each note contains publication information about the source. A separate bibliography page at the end of the paper lists all sources alphabetically, with slightly different formatting than the notes.

Author-date style uses brief parenthetical citations in the text — typically the author's last name and the year of publication — that correspond to full entries in a reference list at the end of the paper. This approach will feel familiar if you have already studied APA style, though the specific formatting details differ.

Notes-bibliography style is built on a two-part logic: the note and the bibliography entry. Every time you use a source in your paper — whether you quote it directly, paraphrase it, summarize it, or rely on it for factual information — you insert a superscript number at the end of the relevant sentence or clause. That number corresponds to a note that provides full publication information about the source.

The note appears either at the bottom of the page on which the citation occurs (a footnote) or in a collected list at the end of the paper before the bibliography (an endnote). The information in the note allows readers to find and verify the source you used.

The bibliography is a separate alphabetical list at the end of the paper that gathers all sources cited. It includes the same basic information as the notes but formatted somewhat differently. Together, the notes and bibliography give readers two ways to track your sources: through the note at the moment of citation and through the bibliography when they want a complete overview of your research.

Students sometimes find it confusing that notes-bibliography style requires both notes and a bibliography. If the notes already give full source information, why include a bibliography too?

The answer has to do with the different purposes each element serves. Notes appear at the moment you use a source, providing immediate information exactly when a reader might want to check your claim or follow up on an idea. The bibliography provides a consolidated view of your entire research landscape. A reader who wants to know which books you consulted about the French Revolution does not have to hunt through footnotes on twenty different pages; they can look at the bibliography and see everything at once. The bibliography also confirms that a source was formally cited, not merely mentioned or forgotten.

Some instructors assign papers that require only a bibliography, without notes, when the paper is short and the citation information is simple. Others require notes but no bibliography. For a full research paper, however, both are typically expected. When in doubt, provide both.

Notes are numbered consecutively throughout the paper, beginning with 1. Every time you cite a source, you add the next number in sequence. If your paper has forty source citations, it will have forty notes numbered 1 through 40.

If you are using footnotes, each note appears at the bottom of the page where the superscript number occurs, separated from the body text by a short horizontal line. Word processing software manages footnote placement automatically; you do not have to calculate spacing by hand. If you are using endnotes, all notes are collected on a separate page after the body of the paper but before the bibliography. That page should be titled "Notes" — centered, not bold, in the same font as the rest of the paper.

Most student writers use footnotes because they allow readers to see citation information without flipping to a different page. Endnotes are more common in books, where typesetting footnotes across hundreds of pages becomes complicated. For a course paper, follow your instructor's stated preference.

Chicago notes-bibliography style distinguishes between the first (full) note and subsequent (shortened) notes for the same source. The first time you cite a source, you provide full bibliographic information in the note. If you cite the same source again later in the paper, you may use a shortened form rather than repeating all the information.

A full Chicago footnote or endnote for a book follows this general pattern. Notice that the author's name appears in normal order (First Last) — not reversed as in the bibliography — and publication information appears in parentheses.

For a journal article, the article title appears in quotation marks, the journal name is italicized, and the year appears in parentheses after the volume and issue numbers. A colon separates the year from the page number.

Web sources require more judgment than print sources because they vary in format, authorship, and stability. Chicago recommends including an access date when the content has no clear publication date or when the material is likely to change over time.

Bibliography entries contain the same basic information as footnotes, but they are formatted differently in three important ways. First, the author's last name comes first because the bibliography is alphabetized by last name. Second, publication information for books appears without parentheses, with the three main elements — author, title, publication data — separated by periods rather than commas. Third, full page ranges for articles are included in the bibliography, whereas a note gives only the specific page(s) you cited.

All bibliography entries also use hanging indent format: the first line of each entry begins at the left margin, and any additional lines in the same entry are indented about half an inch. This indentation pattern makes the first element — the author's name — easy to find at a glance when a reader scans the alphabetized list.

For a journal article, the bibliography entry includes the full page range of the article, not just the specific page you cited in your note.

When you cite a chapter in an edited collection, you must identify both the chapter author and the editor of the volume. In the note, the editor's name appears after the title in the form "ed. First Last." In the bibliography, the editor's name follows "edited by" in normal order.

Bibliography entries are listed alphabetically by the first element, which is normally the author's last name. When a source has no author, alphabetize by the first significant word of the title, ignoring "A," "An," and "The."

When you have multiple works by the same author, list them alphabetically by title. After the first entry, you may replace the author's name with a three-em dash (———) followed by a period.

Chicago author-date style is structurally similar to APA, though it differs in specific formatting details. Instead of footnotes or endnotes, the writer places a brief parenthetical citation directly in the text at the point of use. That citation contains the author's last name, the year of publication, and usually a page number. A complete reference list at the end of the paper provides full bibliographic information for each source.

Chicago author-date style is typically specified in disciplines where the currency of research matters — where knowing that a study was published in 2005 versus 2020 gives readers important context. In history, by contrast, a book published in 1950 may be just as important as one published recently, and the year of publication is less central to how readers evaluate a claim. Notes-bibliography style reflects this: the year is present in the note, but it does not dominate the citation.

If your instructor specifies Chicago style without indicating which of the two systems to use, notes-bibliography is almost always the default for undergraduate humanities work. If you are writing in a field that commonly uses Chicago author-date, your instructor will generally say so explicitly.

Author-date citations in the text follow a consistent pattern: the author's last name, year of publication, and page number, all in parentheses. When the author's name is already part of the sentence, only the year and page number go in parentheses.

Reference list entries in Chicago author-date style are similar to bibliography entries, with one critical difference: the year of publication moves immediately after the author's name and is followed by a period. This placement distinguishes author-date reference lists from notes-bibliography bibliographies at a glance.

Online sources present challenges that print sources do not. They can change after you access them, they may lack clear authorship or dates, and their URLs can break. Chicago style addresses these challenges with a set of practical recommendations. Include an author name if one is clearly identified. Include the publication date or last-modified date if available. Include an access date if the content is likely to change or if no publication date is given. Use a stable URL or DOI whenever possible.

History is the discipline most closely associated with notes-bibliography style, and the relationship between Chicago formatting and historical scholarship is not accidental. It reflects something important about how historians think about evidence, sources, and argument.

Historical writing depends on primary sources: documents, letters, diaries, maps, records, artifacts, and other traces of the past. Many of these sources exist in archives, special collections, or unique repositories that cannot be accessed through a library database or a web search. When a historian cites an archival document, the citation must be rich enough to allow another researcher to find exactly the same item — the specific box, folder, and document within a collection held at a particular institution.

Chicago footnotes accommodate this level of specificity in ways that brief parenthetical citations cannot. A single footnote might read:

That level of detail would be impossible to compress into a parenthetical citation without disrupting the flow of the text. Notes-bibliography style gives historians room to be precise without sacrificing readability.

Footnotes also allow historians to do something equally valuable: engage with the scholarly conversation in the notes themselves. A historian might cite a primary source in the body of the text while adding a footnote that acknowledges a competing interpretation, points readers toward additional secondary literature, or explains why a particular translation was chosen. This kind of scholarly annotation is part of what makes historical writing different from journalism or popular nonfiction. The footnotes are not formalities — they are a place where the scholar's intellectual engagement with the material becomes visible to careful readers.

Philosophy, art history, musicology, religious studies, and related fields also favor Chicago style, though each adapts the system to its own conventions. Philosophers frequently cite classical texts using traditional numbering systems — book, section, and paragraph numbers rather than page numbers — that Chicago style can accommodate. Art historians cite image reproductions, museum collections, and visual archives in ways that require careful adaptation of standard note formats. Musicologists cite scores, recordings, and performances alongside conventional print and digital sources.

In all these disciplines, the underlying logic of Chicago style remains constant: give credit precisely, help readers find your sources, and document your intellectual debts. What varies is the specific application of that logic to different types of materials.

Literary studies occupies an interesting middle position. Many literary scholars use MLA style, particularly when writing about contemporary or British and American literature in contexts where MLA is the established convention. However, scholars working in older historical periods, in comparative literature, in translation studies, or in fields with strong connections to history and classical scholarship often use Chicago style.

If you are writing a literary analysis paper and your instructor has not specified a style, MLA is the safer default for most undergraduate contexts. But if the assignment is framed as historical, cultural, or archival research, Chicago may be more appropriate. When in doubt, ask before you begin writing.

Chicago style does not specify one universal paper format for all academic purposes. The Chicago Manual of Style is primarily a guide for published books and articles, not for student papers. However, it provides clear general guidance that has become the standard for undergraduate and graduate academic work. Unless your instructor specifies otherwise, a Chicago-style student paper should follow the conventions in the table below.

Chicago style for student papers typically requires a title page rather than a heading at the top of the first text page. The title page should include the title of the paper, centered in the upper half of the page; your name, centered below the title; and the course name and number, instructor name, and date centered in the lower portion of the page. Formatting is plain — no decorative elements, no running header.

Unlike MLA, which uses a header with the student's last name and page number on every page, Chicago style for student papers generally does not require a running header. A simple page number in the upper right corner is sufficient.

If your instructor does not require a separate title page, center the title on the first page of the paper, double-space, and begin the text. Your name, course, and date may appear at the top of the first page or in a brief header.

Short undergraduate papers typically do not use internal headings. Longer papers and research papers may use headings to guide readers through major sections. Chicago style recommends a heading hierarchy but does not mandate a single visual format. A common student-paper approach uses the pattern in the table below. For most undergraduate papers, two levels of headings are sufficient. Whatever system you choose, use it consistently — do not switch heading styles partway through a paper.

If you are using endnotes rather than footnotes, the notes page comes after the last page of body text and before the bibliography. Title it "Notes" — centered, not bold, in the same font as the rest of the paper. Notes are listed in order, each one indented like a paragraph.

The bibliography comes last, titled "Bibliography" and formatted the same way. Entries are listed alphabetically, formatted with hanging indents, and single-spaced within each entry with a blank line between entries.