Chicago Citation Generator
Build correctly formatted Chicago citations - footnotes, bibliography entries, and author-date references for books, journals, and websites.
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About the Chicago Citation Generator
Most Chicago generators hand you one citation and leave you to sort out the rest. This one builds the whole bibliography. Add a source and it drops into an alphabetized list that saves on your device, and you keep adding until every source you cited is in there. When you copy, the italics come with it, so your book and journal titles land in Word already formatted instead of going flat the second you paste. Chicago is really two citation systems, Notes-Bibliography and Author-Date, and the tool builds both. Pick the one your assignment wants, fill the short form, and the correct citations appear as you type, without any of it leaving your browser.
Build a whole Chicago bibliography, source by source
Free Chicago tools tend to get one thing wrong about how people actually use them. They format a single entry, you copy it, and then you are on your own for the other fourteen sources. You paste it into your document and the italics vanish, so you go back and re-italicize every title by hand, then reorder the list alphabetically yourself. And if you close the tab before you finish, the whole thing is gone.
This tool treats the bibliography as the real job. Fill in a source, press Add, and it joins a list that sorts itself by the first author's surname, which is exactly the order Chicago wants. Add the next one and it slots into place. The list is saved on your device, so you can close the tab, come back tomorrow, and your sources are still sitting there, no account and no upload. When you are ready, copy the entire list at once. Choose Copy list with formatting and the italics survive the paste into Word or Google Docs, or grab it as plain text if you are dropping it somewhere that strips styling.
The same saved sources also re-shape to match whichever system you pick. In Notes-Bibliography they come out as a bibliography, and you see the matching footnote under each entry. Flip to Author-Date and those same sources become a reference list with the short in-text citation shown instead. You enter each source once and read it either way.
Chicago is really two systems, and they look nothing alike
Chicago style, set out in The Chicago Manual of Style, is really two separate systems, and they are not interchangeable. Mixing them is a classic way to bleed marks. This tool builds both to the 17th edition of the manual. An 18th edition was published in September 2024, so check your course sheet before you submit and see which one it names.
Notes-Bibliography uses footnotes or endnotes plus a bibliography at the end. Every citation puts a small superscript number in your text and a matching note at the bottom of the page. This is the humanities system, so history, literature, art, and philosophy tend to use it. If your reading is full of little numbers dotted through the prose, that is this one.
Author-Date drops a short (Author Year) straight into your sentence and backs it with a reference list, with no footnotes at all. This is the sciences and social sciences system, and it behaves much like APA or Harvard. Economics, sociology, psychology, the lab sciences, usually Author-Date.
So which do you need? Your assignment brief almost always says, look for Chicago (Notes-Bibliography) or Chicago (Author-Date) spelled out. If it does not, check what the journals in your field do. The toggle at the top of the tool flips between the two so you can see a source both ways without retyping it.
The footnote and the bibliography entry are not the same
This is what people miss most in Notes-Bibliography, so it is worth a careful look. One source produces two differently shaped citations, and you need both.
Take a book by John Smith. The footnote, the note at the foot of the page, reads:
John Smith, Learning Python (London: Tech Press, 2020).
The bibliography entry, the alphabetized list at the back, reads:
Smith, John. Learning Python. London: Tech Press, 2020.
There are three deliberate differences. The name order flips, so the footnote keeps John Smith while the bibliography inverts to Smith, John and sorts by surname. The punctuation changes, so the footnote strings elements with commas and parks the publication facts in parentheses, while the bibliography uses periods and sets those facts out plainly. And the year moves, tucked inside the parentheses in the note but sitting at the very end of the bibliography entry.
They do different jobs. The footnote points a reader, mid-sentence, to where a fact came from, with a page number if you are quoting. The bibliography is the sorted master list of everything you consulted. The tool builds both at once, and it shows the footnote right under each saved bibliography entry, so you never paste one where the other belongs.
How to use
- Pick your system. Set the toggle to Notes-Bibliography or Author-Date, whichever your assignment or field wants. The output changes to match. N-B shows a footnote and a bibliography entry. Author-Date shows a reference entry and an in-text citation.
- Choose the source type. Book, Journal Article, or Website. The form swaps to the fields that source actually needs, so a book asks for place and publisher, a journal for volume, issue, and pages, a website for a URL and an access date.
- Enter the authors as
Last, First, for exampleSmith, John. Chicago keeps full first names, so do not cut them down to initials. Separate several authors with a semicolon. The tool inverts only the first name where Chicago inverts it, and it keeps natural order everywhere else, including the switch to et al. in a footnote. - Fill in the title and the rest. Type the title as printed. Leave any field you do not have blank and the punctuation closes around the gap. Leave the Year empty and the citation shows
n.d., Chicago's mark for an undated source. - Press Add to build your list. The source drops into the alphabetized bibliography below and the form clears for the next one. Keep going until every source is in.
- Copy what you need. Copy a single entry from its panel, or copy the whole list with Copy list with formatting to keep the italics, or take it as plain text. Remove trims one entry, and Clear list empties it. Your list stays saved on this device until you clear it.
How Chicago differs from APA, MLA, and Harvard
Students juggle these four constantly, and the tells are small enough to cost marks when you blur them.
APA is author-date like Chicago's second system, but it shortens first names to initials (Smith, J.), joins authors with an ampersand, and puts a comma before the year in text, (Smith, 2020). Chicago spells first names out, uses the word and, and drops that comma, (Smith 2020).
MLA is the odd one out, author-page rather than author-date. Its in-text citation is (Smith 45), a page number and no year at all. Bare page numbers point you to MLA, not Chicago.
Harvard sits close to Chicago Author-Date but writes the year in parentheses after the author, Smith, J. (2020), and keeps an in-text comma, (Smith, 2020). Chicago writes the year plain and skips the comma.
The clearest tell for Chicago is the footnote. Numbered notes at the foot of the page, used for citations, mean Chicago Notes-Bibliography. None of the other three rely on footnotes as their main method, so if you spot them you are almost certainly in Chicago territory.
Frequently asked questions
Can one source list feed both Chicago systems?
Yes, and that is the point of building the list here rather than one citation at a time. Each saved source stores the raw details, not a finished string, so when you flip the system toggle the whole list re-renders. Notes-Bibliography shows it as a bibliography with footnotes underneath, Author-Date shows it as a reference list with the in-text form. You do not re-enter anything, and switching back and forth never loses a source.
How do I cite four or more authors in Chicago?
The two halves of the citation part ways here. In the bibliography or reference list, you name every author up to ten, with only the first one inverted and the rest in natural order. Past ten, Chicago lists the first seven and then et al., which spares you typing out a physics paper with forty names on it. In a footnote, you shorten much earlier, to the first author plus et al., as in John Smith et al.. Enter every author once, separated by semicolons, and the tool lists them in full where it should and collapses to et al. in the note. One small spelling point, it is et al. with the period on al, never "et. al."
Why is there no comma in the in-text citation?
Because Chicago Author-Date writes it that way, (Smith 2020) with nothing between the author and the year. APA and Harvard both put a comma there, so this is a real difference between the styles rather than a typo. Fill in the Page you are quoting box and the bracket becomes (Smith 2020, 45), a comma before the page number but still none before the year. Graders who know Chicago catch the stray comma instantly.
Why are there two page boxes on a journal article?
They hold two different numbers and only one of them belongs in each place. Pages is the article's own extent, the 45 to 67 that says how long the piece is, and Chicago wants it in the bibliography or reference-list entry. Page you are quoting is the single page your borrowed sentence sits on, and that is what goes into a footnote or into the author-date bracket. Filling the extent into both would produce (Smith 2020, 45-67), which tells your reader the quotation runs across 23 pages. Leave the quoting box empty when you are paraphrasing rather than quoting, and the bracket stays short.
What happens if a source has no author or no date?
For a missing date, the citation uses n.d. in place of the year, and the tool inserts it the moment you leave the Year field empty. For a missing personal author, name the organization responsible, a company, a government body, or the site owner. Type that organization with no comma and the tool keeps it exactly as written instead of trying to invert it or make initials of it.
Does my bibliography really stay saved, and is it private?
It is saved on your own device and nowhere else. There is no account, no upload, and no copy of your list on any server. Come back next week and your sources are still there. The trade-off is that it lives in this one browser, so clearing your site data, or opening the tool on a different computer, starts you with an empty list. Copy the finished list into your document once you are done, so you always have it where the work actually lives.
Does this follow Chicago 17th edition?
Yes. It follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, for both systems, the name inversion, the n.d. marker, the no. before a journal issue in a note, and the retrieval notes for web pages. The 18th edition of the manual reached print in September 2024, so if your course sheet names an edition rather than just saying Chicago, read it before you rely on anything here. It handles the three most common source types cleanly, books, journal articles, and websites. For an unusual source, a chapter in an edited book, a translated work, an archival manuscript, check the output against a manual or your instructor's house guide, since Chicago has specific rules that no short form can cover for all forty-plus source types.