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Chicago is the house style of The Chicago Manual of Style, and it is the only major style that offers two complete and incompatible citation systems. Picking the wrong one is the most common Chicago mistake, so start with the decision below before you generate anything.
Notes-bibliography cites sources with a numbered footnote or endnote on the page, plus an alphabetized bibliography at the end. It is standard in history, art history, literature, and theology, because it lets you cite an archival document or add a comment without interrupting the sentence.
Author-date cites sources parenthetically — (Smith 2020, 45) — with a reference list at the end, and is used in the sciences and most social sciences. The two systems format the same book differently, so never mix them in one paper. CiteCreate's Chicago output follows notes-bibliography, which is what most humanities courses ask for.
A Chicago bibliography entry inverts the author's name, italicizes the book title, and ends with publisher and year. The first footnote gives the same information in running order, inside parentheses, and ends with the specific page you used — the page number is what a note is for.
Example
Smith, John A. The Craft of Research. 4th ed. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
In-text: 1. John A. Smith, The Craft of Research, 4th ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2020), 45.
For an article, the article title goes in quotation marks and the journal title is italicized, followed by the volume, the issue as "no. 3", the year in parentheses, and the page range. A DOI is preferred over a URL when the article has one.
Example
Smith, John A. “The Role of Machine Learning in Academic Writing.” Journal of Educational Technology 41, no. 3 (2023): 215–32. https://doi.org/10.1234/jet.2023.0041.
In-text: 1. John A. Smith, “The Role of Machine Learning in Academic Writing,” Journal of Educational Technology 41, no. 3 (2023): 215–32.
The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style appeared in 2024, but a great many syllabi and journals still specify the 17th (2017). For everyday citations the two are close, and the practical differences you are most likely to notice are these:
Almost every Chicago deduction comes from the same handful of slips, and all of them are easy to check before you submit.
Use notes-bibliography for history, art, and the humanities, and author-date for the sciences and social sciences. Your assignment brief or the journal's submission guidelines decide it; when neither says, humanities courses expect footnotes.
The 18th edition was published in 2024 and is current, but the 17th edition (2017) is still widely assigned. For a standard book or article citation the two produce nearly identical output, so either is safe unless your instructor specifies one.
No. From the 17th edition onward the publisher's city is omitted for books, so the entry ends with the publisher name and year. CiteCreate follows this rule.
Chicago now discourages it. Instead of Ibid., repeat a shortened note — the author's last name, a short title, and the page — which stays clear even after your text is edited and the notes move.
Yes. Chicago notes, bibliography entries, BibTeX, and RIS export are all free, with no account required.