Chicago Style Citation Generator
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Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN and get a Chicago author-date reference with its in-text citation, following the 18th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. One thing to know first: Chicago has two systems, and this generator makes author-date, not footnotes.
Author-date or notes and bibliography?
The Chicago Manual of Style has two citation systems, and your guide will name one.
Author-date puts a short citation in the text, (LeCun et al. 2015), and a reference list at the end. It is used in the sciences and social sciences. This generator makes author-date.
Notes and bibliography puts a superscript number in the text, the citation in a footnote, and a bibliography at the end. It is used in history, literature and the arts. If you need footnotes, use your reference manager's Chicago note style, or Word's citation tool, instead.
How to create a Chicago citation
Step 1
Paste the source
A DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN, or a link to it. Up to 50, one per line, or upload a .bib, RIS, EndNote or PubMed export.
Step 2
Pick what you need
Chicago is already the style. Single citation gives the reference, Reference list gives the sorted list, In-text citation gives (LeCun et al. 2015).
Step 3
Copy
The reference list keeps its italics and hanging indent when you paste it into Word or Google Docs.
Chicago author-date format by source type
Real references from the generator.
Journal article
LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. “Deep Learning.” Nature 521 (7553): 436–44. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.
Book
Goodfellow, Ian, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. 2016. Deep Learning. MIT Press.
Chapter in an edited book
Rumelhart, David E., Geoffrey E. Hinton, and Ronald J. Williams. 1988. “Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors.” In Neurocomputing: Foundations of Research, edited by James A. Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld. MIT Press.
Seven or more authors
Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, et al. 2017. “Attention Is All You Need.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30: 5998–6008.
The year comes straight after the authors, which is the quickest way to tell Chicago author-date from APA. Titles are in title case; article titles in quotation marks, books and journals in italics.
Chicago in-text citations
(LeCun et al. 2015) or LeCun et al. (2015)
No comma between author and year; APA has one, Chicago does not. A page number follows a comma, with no "p.": (LeCun et al. 2015, 440). Type the page in the page box and both forms update.
- One or two authors: every name, (Shannon 1948), (Jordan and Mitchell 2015).
- Three or more authors: the first author and et al., (LeCun et al. 2015). The 18th edition shortens from three authors; the 17th waited until four.
- Same authors, same year: 1979a and 1979b, in the text and in the list: (Kahneman and Tversky 1979a).
Frequently asked questions
The 18th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, published in 2024. Its author-date references differ from the 17th edition only in small details, such as dropping the publisher's city for books.
In the reference list, up to six authors are named in full; with seven or more, the first three followed by et al. In the text, three or more authors become the first author and et al. Both are applied for you.
No. It makes author-date references and in-text citations only. For notes and bibliography, use a reference manager with a Chicago note style.
No: (LeCun et al. 2015). The comma only appears before a page number: (LeCun et al. 2015, 440).
Not with the generator: they have no DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN to look up. Write those entries by hand following the Chicago Manual.
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