Citations and Avoiding Plagiarism

In-Text Author-Date Style Guide

Chicago has two types of citation styles: author-date and notes-bibliography. Your school, department, or professor may have one that they prefer, so be sure to check which type of style should be used. This section will provide information on the the Author-Date style.

Where can I put in-text citations in a sentence?

When using the author-date style, in-text citations are placed in parentheses and the paper ends with a reference list. In-text citations can be placed either at the end of the sentence or in the middle of a sentence. For example:

• “Conceptions of masculinity and femininity and, as a result, fatherhood and motherhood, were crafted over time as perceptions of what it meant to be a man and a woman changed” (Barca 2020, 16).
  • Note the quotation marks because this is a direct quote; the citation is in parentheses and there is only a comma between the year and page number. The citation goes before the punctuation at the end of the sentence.
• As Barca (2020, 16) explains, Victorian parenthood was highly malleable and vulnerable to change as those in power shaped how children were raised and households were run.
  •  There are no quotation marks in this sentence because the author is summarizing from the source material; however, the author is referencing what the source material said closely enough to warrant a page number.

How do I cite a source with more than one author?

If more than one person authored a piece but there are less than four authors total, include each author in the in-text citation. If there are four or more authors, only include the first author’s last name and use “et al.” to refer to the rest of the authors. For example:

• Three or less authors: (Smith, Doe, and White 2021, 40)
• Four or more authors: (Smith, Doe, White, and Rose 2021, 40)  → (Smith et al. 2021, 40)

What if I want to cite more than one source at the same time?

If you want to reference more than one source at the same time, use a semicolon to separate each source and place the sources in alphabetical order. This can be done if you want to demonstrate that more than one source discussed the idea you’re exploring.

• (Doe 2020; Smith 2017; White 2021)
  • Note that these citations do not have page numbers. Page numbers are not required if you are referring to the text in general rather than a particular part of it. However, if you were referring to specific parts of each text, you would include a page number with each citation.

What is a block quote and how should I cite it?

If you want to include a quote that is 100 or more words or five or more lines long, you must format it into a block quote. A block quote is single-spaced, and the entire quote should be indented 0.5” from the margin; this is the same indent spacing as when starting a new paragraph. There are no quotation marks in a block quote; the quote should end with a period and then the page number in parentheses outside of the punctuation.

See the following example:

As the author explains,

If literature reflects the social world, the way women are depicted in fiction may shed light on how women behaved—or were expected to behave—in real-life 18^th century England. Oftentimes, female characters are powerful until rendered powerless by patriarchal conventions present throughout society. The mechanisms of subordination were marriage, domesticity, and submission to men. For the women in this sample, osteoporosis and bone frailty were inevitable as they bore children and grew old; these were biosocial realities that largely could not be negotiated by women in traditional positions of little power as we often see inevitably happen to women in literature. (Barca 2021, 4)

Chicago Notes-Bibliography Style

Chicago has two types of citation styles: author-date and notes-bibliography. Your school, department, or professor may have one that they prefer, so be sure to check which style should be used. This section will provide information the Notes-Bibliography style.

When do I use a superscript and footnote?

When writing a paper in Chicago using the notes-bibliography style, you will need to include a superscript number and footnotes instead of your typical in-text citations that use parentheses.

In order to cite a source, add a superscript to the end of your sentence after the punctuation.

• These roles, which were privileges of the wealthy, did not remain static over time, however, nor did the complementary roles of femininity and motherhood.¹

Microsoft Word has a feature that allows you to insert a superscript and automatically generate a footnote with that same number; the superscript goes next to the sentence in your text, whereas the footnote is going to contain the source at the bottom of the page under a line to break the main text from the sources. To do this in Word, select “References” at the top of the page; then, click “Insert Footnote”. Every time a footnote is added, Word will generate them in chronological order.

After inserting a superscript using this tool, the document should automatically look like this:

What is the difference between a long footnote and short footnote, and when do I use each?

Footnotes can be short or long. Include a long footnote when you are including a source for the first time in your paper.

1. Maria A. Barca, "The Impact of Gender and Class on Disease and Trauma in 18th Century London: A Case Study of Three Cemetery Populations" (Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2020), 35-37.

Short footnotes, on the other hand, can be used if a source that was already cited is mentioned again in the paper.

1. Barca, “Impact”, 35.

What is a block quote and when do I include it in the text?

A block quote requires a superscript at the end of the quote after the punctuation. Turn a quote into a block quote if it is 100 or more words or 5 or more lines. For example:

If literature reflects the social world, the way women are depicted in fiction may shed light on how women behaved—or were expected to behave—in real-life 18^th century England. Oftentimes, female characters are powerful until rendered powerless by patriarchal conventions present throughout society. The mechanisms of subordination were marriage, domesticity, and submission to men. For the women in this sample, osteoporosis and bone frailty were inevitable as they bore children and grew old; these were biosocial realities that largely could not be negotiated by women in traditional positions of little power as we often see inevitably happen to women in literature.¹

What's the difference between how I cite in the bibliography vs. how I cite in the footnotes?

You may also be required to include your footnotes in a bibliography at the end of your paper. There are different ways to format your bibliography entries depending on the type source being used. Using the above example, this is how you would cite a thesis or dissertation in the bibliography:

• Barca, Maria A. “The Impact of Gender and Class on Disease and Trauma in 18th Century London: A Case Study of Three Cemetery Populations.” Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2020.

Note that that the long footnote and bibliography entry include different information and punctuation. Here is the long footnote again for this source:

• Maria A. Barca, "The Impact of Gender and Class on Disease and Trauma in 18th Century London: A Case Study of Three Cemetery Populations" (Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2020), 35-37.

The footnote writes the name in first-last order, includes the type of document, university, and year in parentheses, and includes page numbers; the bibliography entry, on the other hand, writes the name in last-first order, does not include parentheses, and does not include page numbers.