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Citing Information: In-Text Citations

Chicago: In-Text

Chicago: In-Text Citations

For full guidance, please consult The Chicago Manual of Style Online (access for UNC affiliates via Onyen login). 

In the Notes and Bibliography system, citations are generally provided in the main text through the use of footnotes or endnotes. In addition, a bibliography provides complete information on the works cited and may also refer to other works consulted. One of the strengths of the Notes and Bibliography system is its flexibility; see chapter 14 of the Chicago Manual of Style for more details.

Most modern word-processing software supports robust footnote and endnote handling, including automatic updating and renumbering of note numbers and placement of notes. To avoid complications arising from formatting notes and from inserting and deleting references, make use of your word processor's footnote/endnote capabilities.

For Exact Quotes

Rule: Citations are provided in numbered footnotes (at the bottom of the page containing the reference) or endnotes (at the end of the paper). Notes should be numbered consecutively throughout the paper even if you are citing a source more than once. Numbering should not be restarted on each page or used out of sequence. The note indicator, a number in superscript, follows the final punctuation of the citing sentence in the main body of the text. In a paper without a bibliography, or for cited works not included in the bibliography, a complete citation should be given for the work being cited.

Example:

"The life and work of Henry James offer a wealth of impressions to readers with eyes for the unconventional: the author and many of his male characters defy stereotypes of masculinity, asking in their varied voices if culture allows for deviation."1


1. Kelly Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 1.

Rule: If a complete bibliography is included in the paper, an abbreviated citation may be given the first time the work is cited. At a minimum, the author's last name, an abbreviated title for the work, and the page number of the citation should be given. More information may be included as necessary to uniquely identify the work being cited.

Example:

If a complete bibliography is included in the paper, the first reference to the above citation may be written:

1. Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity, 1.

Rule: In a paper with no notes or bibliography, a complete citation may be given in parentheses following the quotation. For parenthetical citations, the citation should come immediately before the final punctuation of the sentence containing the reference. An abbreviated citation may be used if some of the citation information is incorporated into the text.

Examples:

"The life and work of Henry James offer a wealth of impressions to readers with eyes for the unconventional: the author and many of his male characters defy stereotypes of masculinity, asking in their varied voices if culture allows for deviation" (Kelly Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994], 1).

As Kelly Cannon writes in Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1), "...[James] and many of his male characters defy stereotypes of masculinity, asking in their varied voices if culture allows for deviation."

Rule: If material from the same source is quoted in the next page or two, and there are no intervening quotations from other sources, "Ibid." may be used in place of the standard reference. The page number should be included if the reference is from a different page than the previous reference.

Example:

"Far from offering absolutes about reality, James's ambiguity points to the modern age, with its shifting notions of 'truth'."2


2. Ibid., 2.

When ibid. is used in an in-text citation it is not capitalized. For example:

"Far from offering absolutes about reality, James's ambiguity points to the modern age, with its shifting notions of 'truth'" (ibid., 2).

Rule: If a different source has intervened, or if more than two or three pages have elapsed since the last reference to the source, an abbreviated citation should be provided.

Example:

"Henry James celebrated the powers of the imagination, which he felt helped a person to appreciate worlds and lives different from his or her own."7

7. Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity, 31.

Rule: In general, quoted material that runs more than one hundred words, or more than eight typed lines, is usually set off from the text (i.e. with indented margins); this is called a block quotation. Quotation marks are not used in this case. When endnotes or footnotes are used, cite the source of a block quotation in the standard manner. When in-text citations are used, the source of a block quotation should be given in parentheses at the end of the quotation. The reference should be placed after the final punctuation mark so that it will not be read as part of the quotation. No punctuation is used following the reference.

Example:

Bloom himself points out the interplay between Emerson and Whitman in Stevens' work:

Though Stevens read Emerson early and fully, and remembered much more than he realized, his Emersonianism was filtered mostly through Whitman, a pervasive and of course wholly unacknowledged influence upon all of Stevens' major poetry. I am using 'influence' in my rather controversial but I think quite useful sense of 'misprison' or revisionist interpretation of tradition, an interpretation of manifest in the later poet's own work. But before I begin the very complex account of the interpoetic relation between Whitman and Stevens that will run all through these chapters, I want first to examine Whitman's own modification of Emersonian theory, by way of looking at crossing or rhetorical disjunctions in one of Whitman's strongest and most influential poems. (Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976], 10)

Rule: The first time you give the full citation for a work with multiple authors, list all the work's authors in the note.

Example:

10. Charles Wilson and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold war Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89.
11. A. Andrew John, Rowena A. Pecchenino, and Stacey L. Schreft. "The macroeconomics of Dr. Strangelove." American Economic Review 83, no. 1 (March 1993): 51.

Rule: For subsequent citations of works with two or three authors, list the last names of all authors. If more than three authors, use "et al."

Example:

13. Wilson and Parker, Waging Peace, 91.
14. Bailyn, Bernard, et al. The Great Republic: History of the American People, 58.

Rule: For works with a government or corporate author, the name of the organization is used in place of the author's name.

Example:

19. American Red Cross, Annual Report (Washington, DC: American Red Cross, 1990), 22.

For Paraphrased Ideas

Rule: Writers need to give credit for words and ideas taken from others, even if the material used is not a direct quotation. In this case, place the note indicator immediately after the final punctuation of the sentence containing the paraphrased material. No quotation marks are required if material is paraphrased.

Example:

Bloom recognizes that Whitman's influence on Stevens' work was at least as strong as Emerson's.9

For Reproduced Images

Rule: When referring to an image that is reproduced in an appendix, place the figure number of the image in parentheses at the end of the sentence. A full citation should be placed directly under the image where it appears in the appendix, and should be prefaced by a figure number.

Example:

Monet's Meadow with Haystacks at Giverny is an excellent example of impressionist painting (fig. 2).


Fig. 2. Claude Monet. Meadow with Haystacks at Giverny, oil on canvas, 1885 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). ARTstor.