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A guide to Chicago / Turabian Style

This Guide follows the bibliography-style as shown in Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. General format requirements are:

Margins: 1" on top, bottom, and sides

Font: Times New Roman, Courier, or Helvetica; twelve-point type for the body of the text is preferable--no smaller than ten-point

Spacing and Indentation: Double-space all text except the following

  • block quotations (see 25.2.2 of text)
  • table titles and figure captions
  • lists in appendixes

The following should be single-spaced internally but with a blank line between items:

  • table of contents
  • lists of figures, tables, or abbreviations
  • footnotes or endnotes
  • bibliographies or reference lists

Pagination:

Do not number the title page if that is your only front matter. Number pages in the body of the paper and the back matter (bibliographies or reference lists) with Arabic numerals, starting on the first page of the text (page 2 if you count the title page). Page numbers are placed either centered or flush right in the footer or centered or flush right in the header. Be consistent in your placement.

Title page:

Class papers should begin with a title page.  Place the title of the paper a third of the way down the page, usually centered.  If the paper has both a main title and a subtitle, put the main title on a single, followed by a colon, and begin the subtitle on a new line with an intervening line space.  Place your name several lines below the title with any information requested by your instructor, such as course title and date.

In bibliography-style citations, you signal that you have used a source by placing a superscript number at the end of the sentence in which you refer to it:

He concludes that "being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith."¹

You then cite the source of that quotation in a correspondingly numbered note that provides information about the source (author, title, and facts of publication) plus any relevant page numbers. Notes are printed at the bottom of the page--called footnotes--or in a list collected at the end of your paper called endnotes.

N.     1. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 5.

If you cite the same text again, shorten it:

N.      2. Lanier, Not A Gadget, 133-34.

In most cases, you also list sources at the end of the paper in a bibliography.  This is a list of all the sources you cited in a note and sometimes other you consulted but not cite.  Each bibliography entry includes the same information contained in a full note, but in a slightly different form:

B.     Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Arrangement of entries is alphabetical by the last name of the author, editor, or whoever is first in each entry. If you have two or more works by the same author or authors, alphabetize by the first word of the title ignoring A, And, The.

For details on the bibliography list, see pages 151-152 of the text.

These examples show you what elements are found in a note and bibliography and the order you list them.  Note the punctuation used at the end of each element, and the capitalization used in the title: subtitle.

N.  ## (the number of the note e.g. ¹) followed by a period. Author's First and Last Names, Title of Book: Subtitle of Book (Place of Publication: Publisher's Name, Date of Publication), XX-XX (page numbers e.g 45-50.

1. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 65-65.

B.  Author's Last Name, Author's First Name. Title of Book: Subtitle of Book. Place of Publication: Publisher's Name, Date of Publication.

Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.

Examples and text taken from A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 8th ed. 144-145.  Examples of all source types can be found on pages 146-148.  For more examples please see the GREEN handout available in the Library.

 

Turabian 8th edition examples

A sample paper from Liberty University using Turabian Notes-Bibliography Style