Chicago Citation Generator for Books
The generator below is preset to Chicago (Chicago 18th edition) for a book.
Check your reference against your institution's guidelines — lecturers sometimes vary the style.
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Paste a URL, DOI, ISBN or title, or fill in the form yourself — the citation updates as you type, and you can copy it formatted, with italics and hanging indent intact, or as plain text. Under the tool you will find the Chicago rules for this source type, worked examples, and the mistakes students make most often.
The rules: Chicago format for books
Template: Author, First Name. Title of Book in Headline Style: Subtitle in Headline Style. Edition. Publisher, Year.
- The first author is inverted; later authors are in normal order. Book titles are italicised and use headline-style capitalisation.
- An edition other than the first is named after the title: 3rd ed.
- Chicago 18th edition book entries give the publisher and the year; no place of publication is included.
- This generator outputs the Chicago bibliography entry plus the author–date in-text form, (Author Year, page). In text: (Vasquez 2021), and (Vasquez 2021, 74) for a specific page.
Examples
Vasquez, Elena. The Architecture of Memory: How the Brain Builds the Past. Brightwood Academic Press, 2021.
Reed, Marcus T. Cognitive Development in Practice. 3rd ed. Harborview Publishing, 2020.
Gomez, Lucia F., and Daniel W. Hart. Statistics for the Social Sciences: A Practical Approach. 2nd ed. Beacon Academic, 2019.
Common mistakes
- Adding a city before the publisher — Chicago 18th edition entries do not carry a place of publication.
- Writing (Vasquez, 2021) with a comma in an author–date citation.
- Lowercasing the book title to sentence case — that is APA, not Chicago.
- Hiding the edition in the middle of the publisher information instead of after the title.
Need this in APA or MLA instead? APA version of this page · MLA version of this page
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