Chicago Citations: Notes and Bibliography Basics

At TIPS we want to help demystify the punctuation minefield that is citation creation. Having proper citations creates a professional image for your book and adds reliability and authority. Here are a few of the basic rules for notes and bibliographies using the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS).[1]

Basic Structure: Author, Title, Facts of Publication

When understanding the basic structure of a note or a bibliography entry using CMOS guidelines, you can call on the eternal wisdom and angelic voice of Julie Andrew’s character in The Sound of Music. As she says, let’s “start at the very beginning / a very good place to start.” For our purposes, that beginning is knowing the three elements of a citation: author, title, and facts of publication.

When you read you begin with A, B, C

When you cite you begin with A, T, P!

A- T- P, A- T- P

The first three steps just happen to be

 A- T- P, A- T- P

Notes

As my indulgent musical interlude suggests, the basic structure of a note in Chicago style is author, title, and facts of publication. Each element is separated by a comma, the facts of publication are enclosed in parentheses, and the citation ends in a period. A correctly formatted endnote looks something like this:

1. Frank Lavin, Home Front to Battlefront: An Ohio Teenager in World War II (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017), 50–51.

Authors

You should list authors’ names in standard order with first names first. In the endnotes, this rule holds for books with multiple authors.

1. John Smith and Jane Doe, We Love TIPS Publishing: A Memoir (Carrboro, NC: ABC Press, 2018), 50.

If a book has a translator or editor in addition to the author, use abbreviations for edited by (ed.) and translated by (trans.).

1. John Smith, I Love TIPS Publishing: A Memoir, trans. Jane Doe (Carrboro, NC: ABC Press, 2018), 50.

Some books have an editor or translator in place of an author. This is common for reference works and textbooks—books that may have a different author for each section or chapter. When citing such a book as a whole, use ed. (or eds.) following the editor’s name (or names). Use trans. when there is a translator in place of an author.

1. John Smith and Jane Doe, eds., Stories of TIPS Publishing (Carrboro, NC: ABC Press, 2018), 50.

Titles

CMOS tells us to capitalize titles written in English by using headline style. Larger works (e.g., books and journals) are italicized and smaller works (e.g., chapters and articles) are enclosed in quotation marks. For example, a chapter in an edited volume would be cited as follows:

1. Jane Doe, “My Experience,” in Stories of TIPS Publishing, ed. John Smith (Carrboro, NC: ABC Press, 2018), 20–30.

Publication Information

The third piece of our A-T-P puzzle is the publication information. At the most basic level, facts of publication include the city of publication, the name of the publisher, and the year published. For notes these all go in parentheses. The publisher’s location is separated from the name of the press with colon and the year is separated from the publisher’s name with a comma. After that is the closing parenthesis, the page numbers (for notes—when the book is not being cited as a whole—and journal articles), and a period. There is no comma before the opening parenthesis for the facts of publication.

#. Author Name, Book Title (City, State/Country: Publisher Name, Year), Page Range.

There are a few nuances with the publication information. Often the state or country can be omitted if the city is well known and unlikely to be confused with another (Baltimore, New York, and London, for instance, can stand alone). The state also need not be present if the publisher’s name identifies the state. Consider the following:

1. Paul E. Hosier, Seacoast Plants of the Carolinas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 17–23.

On the other hand, Washington, DC, is always listed as such.

Occasionally, the publication information is not as simple as city, name, and year. If you are citing a journal article, the publication information must also include the volume and issue number along with the date of publication. If Jane Doe decided to publish her article as part of North Carolina Publishers journal, a potential citation of that work would follow this format:

#. Author Name, “Article Title,” Journal Title Volume#, Issue# (Publication Date): Page Range.

1. Jane Doe, “My Experience,” North Carolina Publishers 100, no. 2 (January 2018): 50–60.

Journal articles often have multiple authors. List up to three in a note. For four to ten authors, list only the first followed by et al. in the note, and list all of them in the corresponding bibliography entry. For those with more than ten authors, list only the first followed by et al. in the note, and list only the first seven followed by et al. in the corresponding bibliography entry (we’ll get to those soon!).

Short Notes

Good news! This three-letter system (A-T-P) just became even simpler, as the long-form note is only required if you meet two criteria: if your work does not have a full bibliography and you are citing the work for the first time. If you have a full bibliography, or if you don’t but you have listed the long-form citation of a work once, proceeding endnotes should only be in short form. The short form of notes is just a simplified version, meaning it uses only the authors’ last names, an abbreviated title, and page numbers while excluding the additional publication information. (When considering the A-T-P mnemonic, you can think of short notes as Author, Title, and Page Numbers!) Our first example of Frank Lavin’s book could be shortened as follows:

1. Lavin, Home Front to Battlefront, 50–51.

A few of our other examples would be shortened in a similar style. Short notes do not include the ed. or trans. abbreviations, so the format will look very familiar.

1. Smith and Doe, We Love TIPS Publishing, 50.

2. Smith, I Love TIPS Publishing, 50.

3. Smith and Doe, Stories of TIPS Publishing, 50.

4. Doe, “My Experience,” 20-30.

Bibliography

The bibliography is the scary older cousin of its numbered notes kin. It has a bit more information, a few more rules, and an inflated sense of self-worth, but the basic formula is the same.  The major differences are the removal of the parentheses around the facts of publication, the use of periods between elements, and the inversion of the first-listed author’s name.

Endnote:

1. Frank Lavin, Home Front to Battlefront: An Ohio Teenager in World War II (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017), 50–51.

Bibliography entry:

Lavin, Frank. Home Front to Battlefront: An Ohio Teenager in World War II. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017.

As our good pal Maria sings, “When you know the notes to sing / You can sing most anything!” The rules of Chicago style citation cover so many variations it can seem impossible to understand them all. However, now that you are comfortable with the basics of the A-T-P structure for citing books and journal articles using Chicago notes-and-bibliography style, you can easily grasp the tricks of any new style guide. If you are looking for more tips on the self-publishing process and the rigors of following a style guide, check out our other blog posts on improving your self-published manuscript, polishing your first draft, and the correct usage of colons and semicolons.

For assistance with handling technicalities, style, or organization of your work, contact TIPS Technical Publishing at (919) 933-2629 or email robert.b.kern@gmail.com.

[1] The notes-and-bibliography style is preferred by many authors in the fields of literature, history, and the arts.  Its close cousin, the author-date reference system, is preferred by many science and social science writers and is nearly identical in content but varies slightly in form.

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