How to Use Chicago Style Footnotes in Your Academic Writing

If you are writing a research paper or an essay on a subject related to humanities, you may need to use a citation style, such as Chicago style. 

This style uses footnotes or endnotes to provide references for your sources, as well as to add extra information or comments that may not fit in the main text.

In this blog post, we will explain what Chicago-style footnotes are, how to format them, and how to use them effectively in your academic writing.

So, let’s dive right in!

What are Chicago-style Footnotes?

In Chicago-style (17th Edition), footnotes are a way of citing sources in academic writing, using numbered notes at the bottom of each page to indicate where the information came from or the source.

The Chicago Manual of Style, which is the authoritative guide for this citation style, offers two formats for citation.

• The Notes and Bibliography Style
• The Author-Date Style 

In this blog, we will talk about the notes and bibliography style as it uses footnotes and endnotes for referencing.

How to Format Chicago-style Footnotes

In Chicago format, there are two types of footnotes:

• Full Notes
• Short Notes

Full notes are the first and full citation of a source, and they include all the details of the source, such as the author, title, publication details, and page number.

Short notes are subsequent and shortened citations of the same source, and they only include the author’s last name, a shortened form of the title, and the page number.

Here is an example for a better understanding of the full notes and shortened version of footnotes:

Here is what you should remember when using footnotes in Chicago Style:

• Use a superscript number for the footnote reference in the text, and place it after any punctuation, except for a dash.
• Start the footnote with the same number as the reference, followed by a period and a space.
• Use the full name of the author and the full title of the source in quotation marks. 
• Include publication information such as city, publisher, and year.
• Separate the elements of the footnote with commas, and end the footnote with a period.
• Indent the first line of each footnote by half an inch, and use single spacing within and between the footnotes.
• If the footnote is too long to fit on one line, break it at a logical point and continue on the next line with the same indentation.

Here is an example of how footnotes should look like in a paper:

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