On the CMOS Online home page, click the Citation Quick Guide tab to learn about the two CMOS citation systems:
Disciplines within Humanities and Social Sciences, such as History, use CMOS citations in research papers. The following explains how to format footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies using the Notes and Bibliography system, also known as Chicago Humanities.
When you directly quote or paraphrase another author’s work in your research paper, CMOS format requires the use of a footnote or endnote.
Within CMOS Online, the Citation Quick Guide's NB page and the chapter 14: Source Citations: Examples page provide examples for how to cite specific sources. These include books, journal articles, websites, interviews, personal communications, unpublished material, manuscript collections, media and more.
If your professor asks you to use footnotes, you will note each source cited on the page itself. If your professor asks you to use endnotes, you will note each source cited in a list at the end of your paper and before your bibliography.
Sample footnotes for a book with one author:
1. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, 2006), 99-100.
2. Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 3.
See that note 1. is a complete citation and note 2. contains a shortened version of the above citation for the same source.
Sample bibliography entry for a book with one author:
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Penguin, 2006.
View the linked examples below to see how footnotes, endnotes and a bibliography appear in a publication.
While footnotes are mainly for citations, footnotes can also contain information that you may wish to exclude from the body of your paper. Please check with your professor or a librarian on any variations to the style formatting shown above.