Citation Styles Guide: Bibliographies - formatting

When citing sources in Chicago-Style citation, it is not enough to only include notes in the body of your work. You must also include a bibliography at the end of your paper that includes every source that you used in your paper. If you did not use information from a source in your paper, it should not be in your bibliography.

When assembling your bibliography for a paper in Chicago-Style citation, please use the following guidelines:

• Start your bibliography on a new page, at the very end of your work.
• Centre “Bibliography” on the page, above the list of entries (not in quotation marks, not underlined, not in bold, not in italics). Leave a blank line between "Bibliography" and your first entry.
• Your entries should be arranged in alphabetical order by the first author’s last name, or by the title of the source when there is no author. Entries should be listed together, even if they take different formats (books, journals, films, etc. . .).
• Every line after the first line of an entry should be indented 0.5 inches from the left margin in what is called a "hanging indentation." You can do this manually or have Microsoft Word or similar word processing programs do it for you. To set the indentation in Word, highlight the entry, right click on the highlighted text, select "Paragraph." In the Paragraph menu, under "Special," select "Hanging" and set it to 0.5 inches or 1.27 cm.
• A work with two to six authors: With a work that has up to and including six authors, list the full names of all of the authors in the order they appear in the work. Place a comma between each author's name in the list and insert "and" before the last author's name. Put the first author's name in inverted order (last name, first name and middle name), but list all other author's names in the order in which they appear.
• A work with more than six authors: With a work that has more than six authors, list the first three authors' names, followed by "et al." Place a comma between each author's name in the list. Put the first author's name in inverted order (last name, first name and middle name), but list all other author's names in the order in which they appear.
• Multiple works by the same author: If you have two or more entries by the same author, they should be listed alphabetically by the names of any additional authors. Entries with only one author are listed before entries by multiple authors when the first author’s names are the same. If all of the authors’ names are the same for two different entries, arrange the two entries alphabetically by their titles. Older editions recommended replacing author(s)' names for the second or additional sources with the same author(s) with a 3-em dash. This is no longer recommended.
• A work with no known author: If the author of your work is unknown, begin your entry with the title of the work. Do not place "Anonymous" where the author would normally go in the entry.
• Capitalize the first and last word and all major words of a title or subtitle. Do not capitalize words such as prepositions (the, a, an), conjunctions (and, or), or other incidental words, unless they are the first or last words in the title or subtitle. This is a capitalization style called "Title case."
• When citing an online source, a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is preferred to a URL. See below for details.

Unless your teacher tells you otherwise, each entry in your Bibliography must have at least one footnote or endnote in your text.

Chicago instructs to include an author's full name in last name, first name order as the first element of a bibliography entry. Usually, you do not abbreviate the name in any way, unless this author is commonly know by these abbreviations (e.g. Tolkien, J. R. R., or Auden, W. H.). This ordering of names is based off of what Chicago refers to as "Western" naming ordering conventions, which will usually given a person's given name(s) first, followed by their family name(s).

However, many cultures follow what Chicago refers to as "Eastern" naming order, where the family name if traditionally listed first. When citing an author whose name follow the Eastern naming order convention, retain that order in your bibliographic entry and do not separate the given and family names with a comma. The only exception to this rule are authors whose names are commonly presented in their writings using Western ordering conventions. For example, the Chinese author Liu Cixin commonly publishes his work in English as Cixin Liu. So, if citing his English work, you would present the name as Liu, Cixin. However, if you were citing his work in the original Chinese, where he is know as Liu Cixin, you would retain the Liu Cixin order.

If an author is published under different forms of their name, each work should be listed under the name that appears on the work, unless the difference is just the use of initials instead of a full names. However, there are cases, such as with deadnames, where an author no longer wishes to be known by an earlier name. In these cases, cite their work under their current name only, regardless of how the work was originally published. For example, list any work by N. D. Stevenson under the name N. D. Stevenson, even though some works by the author were originally published under a previous name.

Whenever possible, always use the original source for any information you use in your essay. However, sometimes it isn't possible to find the original source (e.g. the source is out of print, unavailable through the Library, or not available in a language you can read). In those cases, Chicago Style allows you to cite the information from what it calls a Secondary Source. A secondary source is a book, article, etc, that quotes or references a piece of information, but is not the original source of that information. When citing a secondary source of information, you only list the secondary source in your bibliography, as the secondary source is the source you actually used in your essay. For information on how to cite a secondary source in your notes, see the Notes: Secondary sources box on the Footnotes and Endnotes page of this guide.

Bibliography example:

Feldstein, Ruth. How it Feels to Be Free: Black women entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

In this example, the October 1959 issue of Drum magazine is the original source of the quote about Miriam Makeba. Since we couldn't find a copy of Drum, we used a book by Feldstein, which is where we first found the quote. When constructing the entry for your bibliography, always use the format for the secondary source you actually used, not the format for the original source.