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History 502 -- Krivulskaya

Chicago Style Citation

Screenshot from the Library of Congress website regarding use of citations generated automatically. This applies to ANY auto-generated citation. 


The Chicago Manual of Style is the preferred citation style for history research. There is a simplified version known as Turabian that you might have used before but it is not as complete in providing help on citing from the wide variety of sources you may be using. 

Chicago is different from other citation styles not only on the order of the elements but by providing guidelines for citing from archival collections and other sources generally not used in other disciplines. 

The common format in Chicago is the footnote/bibliography style, but your professor may prefer the endnote format, or even the rarely-used author/date format. Check with them if it is not specified in your syllabus or prompt guidelines. 

A note is structure slightly differently than the entry in a bibliography and is not the same as the caption on an image.  

Zotero (in the Helpful Links for History box to the left) helps create Chicago-style citations but do not trust any automated citation service to be error-free (there are lots of them out there and some are reasonably good, others are very flawed.) 

  • It is up to you to enter the correct information in the correct boxes!
  • Automated citation generators do not correct spelling.
  • Generators do not format correct indentation or italics.  
  • Some generators do not use the most current edition of a citation guide 
  • Most generators will only create a bibliographic entry and you will need to manually revise that to create the footnote/endnote entry. 
  • Double check the result! 

This link is the most recent edition (17th) and requires you to log in with your campus ID and password.