Chicago 17 (author–date) citation guide
Used in: Sciences and social sciences (the notes-bibliography variant is common in history and the humanities).
Chicago style (17th edition) offers two systems. This guide covers the author–date system: brief author–year citations in the text with a matching “References” list. (Chicago’s notes-bibliography system, which uses footnotes, is also supported in Folio when you cite as you write.)
In-text citations
Parenthetical
(Smith and Lee 2021)Author surname and year, no comma before the year.
With page number
(Smith and Lee 2021, 215)Add the page after the year, separated by a comma.
Narrative
Smith and Lee (2021) report…Author named in the sentence; year in parentheses.
Reference list examples
Generated by Folio's citation engine — the same one that formats your bibliography as you write.
Book
García, Maria. 2019. The Architecture of Memory. Academic Press.
Book chapter
Chen, Liang. 2020. “Attention and Encoding.” In Handbook of Cognition, edited by Dana Park. University Press.
Website
Khan, Aisha. 2023. “Understanding Research Methods.” https://example.org/research-methods.
Quick checklist
Do
- Title the list “References” (author–date) — not “Bibliography.”
- Alphabetize by surname and use a hanging indent.
- Spell out “and” between authors in both the text and the reference list.
- Include a DOI or URL for online sources.
Don't
- Don’t mix the author–date and notes-bibliography systems in one paper.
- Don’t put a comma between author and year in the in-text citation.
- Don’t abbreviate the publisher’s name.
Cite in Chicago automatically
Paste a DOI into the free generator, or cite as you write in Folio.