Notes and in-text citations in Chicago Style – notes and bibliography (17th ed.)

Create a spot-on reference in Chicago 17 and 16

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Notes and bibliography – one of the two methods of Chicago Style – does not set forth any rules for creating in-text citations: instead of them, this method uses notes.

A note is a set of information about a source given below the text on the page where this source is being cited or mentioned. A reference to a note is its superscript number written next to the place of citation and duplicated before the note itself.

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS) describes two types of notes: full note and short note.

The structure of a full note is almost the same as the structure of a bibliographic reference according to Chicago Style; however, the elements in it are separated with commas and not with dots, and it also contains round brackets.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2003), 268.

The contents of full notes are different for different types of sources: for more information, see appropriate articles.

A full note is given when a source is being cited for the first time. It allows the reader identifying the source at once, without any further need to turn over many pages and search for it in the general bibliography.

For subsequent citations, short notes are used. They have a standardised structure for all types of sources:

Author's last name (without the first name), Work Title, number of the cited page.

The titles containing more than 4 words are abbreviated in short notes: the articles 'A', 'An', 'The' at the beginning of the title are omitted, and the rest of the title is shortened to several keywords.

Rowling, Order of the Phoenix, 268.

Other citation styles: