In Chicago/Turabian papers using the Author–Date citation system, all the sources you cite throughout the text of your paper are listed together in full in the References section, which comes after the main text of your paper. (If you are using NB, this will be called the bibliography.)

Formatting the References Section

The top of the page, as the rest of your paper, should still include the page number in the right header. On the first line, the title of the page—“References”—should appear centered and not italicized or bolded. After the page title, leave two blank lines before your first citation. 

Unlike the rest of your paper, this page should not be double-spaced: leave a blank line between each citation, but the citations themselves should not be double-spaced. Your citations should be in alphabetical order by the first word in each citation (usually the author's last name).

Each reference should be formatted with what is called a hanging indent. This means the first line of each reference should be flush with the left margin (i.e., not indented), but the rest of that reference should be indented one inch from the left margin. Any word-processing program will let you format this automatically so you don’t have to do it by hand. (In Microsoft Word, for example, you simply highlight your citations, click on the small arrow right next to the word "Paragraph" on the home tab, and in the popup box choose "hanging indent" under the "Special" section. Click OK, and you're done.)

References page

This is a correctly formatted References page in Chicago/Turabian Author–Date style.

Constructing a Citation

The first step in building each individual citation is to determine the type of resource you are citing, since in each citation style formatting differs slightly based on source type. Some common types are a book, a chapter from a book, a journal article, an online book or article, an online video, a blog post, and personal communication such as an email or an interview you conducted. (You'll notice that "website" is not a category by itself. If the information you found is online, you want to determine if you're looking at an online book, an online article, or some other type of document.)

As an example, let's look in detail at the process of citing three particular sources in Chicago style: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (i.e., a book by one author), Project Gutenberg's online text of the same book (i.e., an online book), and an online journal article about the book.

Print Sources

Author Name

You always want to start with the author information. You should present the author information in the following order and format: the author's last name, a comma, the author's first name, the author's middle initial (if given), and then a period:

• Conrad, Joseph.

Title of Source

Next, you should include the title of the source in title case. For a book, the title is italicized.

• Heart of Darkness.

City of Publication

Next, you want to provide the location of the publisher's office. The location is generally a city, such as "London" or "New York, NY."

• London:

Publisher Name

Next, provide the publisher's name, followed by a comma:

• Everyman's Library,

Date of Publication

Now provide the year in which the source was published, followed by a period.

• 1993.

All together, then, the citation looks like this:

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Everyman's Library, 1993.

Online Sources

Now let's take a look at the citation for the online version of the same book, available online through the publisher Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Treat the online version of a print book exactly the same as a print book, but with an indication of where you found it online.

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Project Gutenberg, 2006. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm.

Journal Articles and Multiple Authors

• NooriBerzenji, Latef S., and Marwan Abdi. "The Image of the Africans in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart." Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business 5, no. 4 (2013): 710–726.

Much of this citation will look familiar to you now that you know the basics. Again, we start with the author information. If the source has multiple authors, the citation rules are a little different. The first author will be listed with their surname first (Conrad, Joseph) but subsequent authors will be listed with their first names first (Joseph Conrad). Use the word "and" (not an ampersand, &) before the last author. Here we have only two authors, but if we had five, the "and" would come before the fifth author's last name, after the comma following the fourth author's name.

The date of publication and title are formatted the same. Note that even though APA style says that the article title should not be italicized, the book titles “Heart of Darkness” and “Things Fall Apart” within the article title are still italicized.

The new information here begins with citing the journal this article is from. Include the title of the journal in italicized title case (all major words capitalized, as in the title of a book):

• Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business

Then include the journal volume:

• 5

If an issue number is provided in addition to the volume number, as it is here, add a comma after the volume number, the abbreviation "no.", and the issue number:

• 5, no. 4

Next, list the year of the article's publication in parentheses, followed by a colon:

• (2013):

Finally, list the page numbers of the article, followed by a period [note that the dash between the first and second numbers is an en-dash (–), NOT a hyphen (-) or em-dash (—)]:

• 710–726.

Multiple Publications by the Same Author

If you are referencing multiple publications by (or group of authors) that were published in the same year, there is a special rule for denoting this. You should first order those articles alphabetically by source title in the References section. But then, replace the author's name in all entries except the first one with an em-dash (—).

• Achenbach, Thomas. "Bibliography of Published Studies Using the ASEBA." Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment, 2012. http://www.aseba.org/asebabib.html.
• —. "School-Age (Ages 6–18) Assessments." Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment, 2012. http://www.aseba.org/schoolage.html.