Chicago Style Guide - 17th Edition

The Chicago style provides its users with guidelines to follow to cite a variety of resource materials. However, knowing the citation parts that most works share in common will help make creating your citations easier.

The citation examples for the resource types featured in this guide provide a formatting formula showing each element of the bibliographic citation, along with a bibliographical example, and footnote/endnote example to demonstrate how Chicago's formatting rules are put into practice.

• For information about the citation parts used in the Chicago style, visit the "Citation Parts" page of this guide.
• To look at formatting formulas and citation examples, visit the various sub-tabs under the "Citation Formulas and Examples" page.

Shortened (Subsequent) Citations instead of Ibid.

Ibid. is an abbreviation of the Latin word ibidem, which means "in the same place" and was previously used in Chicago style reference lists to save space. In its 17^th edition, the Chicago Manual of Style discourages the use of ibid. and now now favors the use of shortened citations. Like ibid., shortened citations generally take up less than a line's worth of space. In contrast however, shortened citations provide readers with contextual details about the repeated citation. These details provide clarity and help avoid confusion between resources cited.

Shortened Citations

• The first time you cite a source in a footnote or endnote, you must provide a complete citation. Examples of these are provided throughout the various sub-tabs of the "Citation Formulas and Examples" tab in this guide.
• If you refer to the same source again, use a shortened citation form (including an abbreviated form of the title). For example:

1.  Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 68. 

2.  Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 76.

• If you cite the same source two or more times in a row, you may simply use author’s last name without the abbreviated title.
• Always add the reference's page number, even if it is the exact same as in the citation above it.

3. Deacon, 83.

4. Deacon, 83.

5. Deacon, 42-44.

6. Zdenek Salzmann, Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 124.

7. Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 48.

8. Salzmann, Language, Culture, and Society, 127.