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Chicago 18 citation generator
Paste a DOI, ISBN or link and get a Chicago 18th edition bibliography entry, with the fields shown so you can check them.
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What a reference in Chicago 18 looks like
The shape is always the same: who, when, what, where. Once you can see it, you can check any reference a generator gives you, including this one.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Author. "Title of Article." Journal Name Volume, no. Issue (Year): pages.
Aspelmeyer, Markus. "Measured Measurement." Nature Physics 5, no. 1 (2009): 11-12.
BOOK
Author. Title of Book. Publisher, Year.
Dahl, Roald. Matilda. Jonathan Cape, 1988.
WEB PAGE
Author. "Title of Page." Site Name. Month Day, Year. URL.
World Health Organization. "Air Quality and Health." WHO. March 7, 2024. https://www.who.int/.
Three things Chicago 18 asks for that people get wrong
There are two Chicagos, and they look nothing alike
Notes and bibliography uses footnotes with a bibliography, and is usual in history and the arts. Author-date uses in-text brackets like APA and is usual in the sciences. Choosing the wrong one is a bigger error than any punctuation mistake. This generator produces the bibliography entry.
A footnote is not a bibliography entry
The same source is punctuated differently in a note and in the bibliography: the note uses commas and does not invert the author's name, the bibliography uses full stops and inverts the first author. Copying one into the other is the commonest Chicago mistake.
Only the first author is inverted
In the bibliography, the first author is written family name first so the list can be alphabetised. Every author after that is written normally.
The 18th edition dropped the city
A book citation no longer needs its place of publication: 'Jonathan Cape, 1988', not 'London: Jonathan Cape, 1988'. One consequence surprises people: a simple Chicago bibliography entry for a book now reads the same as its MLA 9 works cited entry. That is correct, not a mistake.
Six authors, then three and et al.
A bibliography entry lists up to six authors. With seven or more, it lists the first three followed by et al. In the text of the author-date system, and in a note, two authors are both named and three or more become the first author and et al.
Repeat the name rather than a dash
When one author has several entries in a row, the 18th edition prefers writing the name out every time. The long dash that used to stand in for a repeated name is no longer the preferred form.
If your course still asks for the 17th
Some reading lists and marking schemes have not caught up. The differences you are most likely to meet are the place of publication, which the 17th edition still wanted, and the author limits, which allowed longer lists before et al. Where they disagree, your marker's instructions win.
Need a different style?
Questions
Is this the 17th or the 18th edition?
The 18th, which is the current edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. It changed the author limits and dropped the place of publication for books, and the publisher lists every change on its own site.
Should I use notes and bibliography or author-date?
Whichever your department asks for. History and the arts usually expect notes and bibliography; the sciences usually expect author-date.
Does Chicago still want the publisher's city?
Not since the 18th edition, which dropped the place of publication for books. If your course is still on the 17th, put the city before the publisher: London: Jonathan Cape.
What is Turabian?
A student-facing adaptation of Chicago, maintained separately. The patterns are close but not identical, so follow whichever your course names.
THE ANDROID APP
Keep them, export them, and check your draft
CiteRight for Android writes Chicago 18 and other supported styles, keeps your references in projects, exports a bibliography, and checks a draft sentence by sentence for text that overlaps a source.