Chicago Style Citation Generator
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Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, or ISBN and get a Chicago author-date reference back, with the in-text citation alongside it. Metadata comes from CrossRef, Europe PMC, arXiv, or OpenLibrary. Upload a .bib, .ris, .enw, or .nbib file to convert a set at once. Read the next section first, because Chicago has two citation systems and this chicago style citation generator only does one of them.
This Chicago style citation generator produces author-date, not notes and bibliography
Chicago supports two systems and they do not look alike.
Author-date puts a short citation in the text, (LeCun et al. 2015), and a reference list at the end. It is standard in the sciences and social sciences.
Notes and bibliography puts a superscript number in the text and the citation in a footnote or endnote, with a bibliography at the end. It is standard in history, literature, and the arts.
This tool does author-date. If your department wants footnotes, this is the wrong tool and nothing here will help, so it is better to know now than after you have pasted forty references. Word’s own citation manager handles Chicago footnotes, as does Zotero with the Chicago note style installed.
If author-date is what you need, everything below applies.
How Chicago author-date formats the reference list and in-text citations
The output looks like this for a journal article and a book:
LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. "Deep Learning and the Future of Machine Vision." Nature 521 (7553): 436-44. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.
Zhang, Wei. 2019. A Book about Things. Example Press.
The year sits directly after the author names rather than in brackets at the end, which is the fastest way to tell a Chicago author-date reference from an APA one at a glance. Titles are title case, article titles in quotation marks, journal and book titles in italics.
As a chicago bibliography generator it sorts the list alphabetically by first author surname whatever order you paste in, and applies a hanging indent.
In text you get:
(LeCun et al. 2015) for parenthetical and LeCun et al. (2015) for narrative.
There is no comma between the author name and the year. APA has one, Chicago does not. This is the single most common thing people correct wrongly when moving between the two styles.
When you add a page number, the comma appears before it and there is no p. label: (LeCun et al. 2015, 440). Type the page into the field on the row and both forms update.
For a different style family entirely, the same sources can be output as APA, MLA, Harvard, IEEE, AMA, or Vancouver from the citation generator without pasting them again.
Sources are looked up by DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, or ISBN. Archival material, interviews, and web pages have no such record, and those are common enough in Chicago-using fields that it is worth saying plainly: you will be writing some entries yourself.
Frequently asked questions
In the reference list, Chicago names up to three authors in full and switches to the first three plus et al. at four or more. In text you get the first author plus et al. from three authors up. Both thresholds are applied automatically, and they differ from APA’s, so do not carry an APA habit across.
The Chicago Manual of Style is the book, currently the 17th edition, and it documents both systems. So a chicago manual of style citation generator and a chicago author date citation generator are the same thing only if the tool produces author-date, which this one does.
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