Citation Styles Guide: Chicago Manual of Style - 17th ed.

Please note that there are two forms of the 17th edition Chicago Manual of Style: Notes-Bibliography style and Author-Date style. At Marianopolis, courses that use the Chicago Manual of Style tend to use the Notes-Bibliography style, which is the focus of this online guide.

Some general formatting rules:

• Spacing: Double-space your paper, except for block quotations (prose quotations of five lines or longer), table titles, and figure captions, which should be single-spaced. Your notes and your bibliography should also be single-spaced. Include an extra line between each bibliographic entry.
• Font: 12-point, standard font (Times New Roman is recommended).
• Margins : 2.54 cm (1 inch) on all sides.
• Numbering: There should be a page number in the top margin of every page after the title page, justified to the right-hand side of the page, beginning with "1".
• Title Page: Unless otherwise instructed by your teacher, the Chicago Manual of Style requires that you include a title page with your paper. This page should include:
  • The title: centered a third of the way down the page (about 6-7 double-spaced lines from the top). If you use a subtitle, end your title with a colon, then start the subtitle on the next line.
  • Your name and class information should appear 6-7 double-spaced lines later.
  • You teacher may request that you include additional information as well, such as your student number or the date.
• Titles of Works: Titles and subtitles of books, journals, magazines, plays, films, websites and television series are italicized. Titles of chapters, articles, short stories, poems, television episodes, and other shorter segments of a larger work are put in quotation marks. As a general rule, capitalize the first and last words in titles and subtitles, as well as all other major words. The following exceptions apply:
  • Lowercase articles (eg: the, a, an), unless they are the first word of the title or subtitle.
  • Lowercase prepositions (eg: on, up, down), unless they are being used as adjectives or as part of a Latin expression used adjectivally or adverbially (eg: De Facto).
  • Lowercase conjunctions (eg: and, or, but, for, nor).
  • Lowercase the word "to."
  • Lowercase any part of a proper name that would be lowercased in text (eg: the "de" in "de Bruges" or the "von" in "von Trapp").
  • Lowercase the second part of a species name (eg: Saimiri boliviensis).

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, is available for consultation at the Reference Desk in the Library.

Additional information on Chicago style citation may be found at these websites: