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Chicago Format Guidelines

Find document formatting, in-text citation guidance, and more for papers written in Chicago/CMOS style.

Footnotes or Endnotes

Visit List of Sources for a full view of how to reference sources.

Long Direct Quotations

  • A prose quotation of five or more lines, or more than 100 words, should be blocked.
  • CMOS recommends blocking two or more lines of poetry.
  • A blocked quotation does not get enclosed in quotation marks.
  • A blocked quotation must always begin a new line.
  • Blocked quotations should be indented with the word processor’s indention tool.

Indirect (Secondary) Sources

Because authors are generally expected to be intimately familiar with the sources they are citing, Chicago discourages the use of a source that was cited within another (secondary) source. In the case that an original source is utterly unavailable, however, Chicago requires the use of "quoted in" for the note.

8. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 103, quoted in Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society (New York: Continuum, 2006), 2.

Anonymous Author

Sources that have no known author or editor should be cited by title. Follow the basic format for "Footnote or Endnote" and "Corresponding Bibliographical Entry" that are exemplified above, omitting author and/or editor names and beginning respective entries with the title of the source.