Chicago Citation Generator for Journal Articles
The generator below is preset to Chicago (Chicago 18th edition) for a journal article.
Check your reference against your institution's guidelines — lecturers sometimes vary the style.
Need a second pair of eyes on the whole assignment? RozContent’s Assignment Support checks referencing, proofreading and structure — first sample free.
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 journal articles
Template: Author, First Name, and Second Author. “Title of Article in Headline Style.” Title of Journal volume, no. issue (Year): first page–last page. https://doi.org/xxxx
- The first author is inverted; later authors are in normal order. Titles use headline-style capitalisation.
- The journal name is italicised, followed by the volume number, then “no.” and the issue number, then the year in brackets, a colon, and the page range with an en dash.
- If the article has a DOI, end with it as https://doi.org/… The DOI is preferred over the article URL.
- List up to ten authors in the bibliography; four or more authors shorten to et al. in text.
- This generator outputs the Chicago bibliography entry plus the author–date in-text form, (Author Year, page). A quotation adds the page after a comma: (Okafor and Torres 2023, 148).
Examples
Okafor, Daniel, and Lena M. Torres. “Mindful Attention and Test Performance in First-Year Students.” Journal of College Learning and Cognition 18, no. 2 (2023): 145–162. https://doi.org/10.1234/jclc.2023.0182
Patel, Sunita K., Ha Nguyen, and Edward J. Brooks. “Group Study Formats and Exam Outcomes.” Journal of College Learning and Cognition 9, no. 1 (2022): 23–38.
Whitaker, James. “Feedback Timing and Revision Quality in Undergraduate Writing.” Writing Studies Quarterly 14 (2021): 201–219.
Common mistakes
- Writing pp. before the page range — the colon carries it in Chicago.
- Putting a comma between the journal name and the volume number.
- Giving the database URL (for example a library proxy link) instead of the DOI.
- Using APA’s sentence case for the article title.
Need this in APA or MLA instead? APA version of this page · MLA version of this page
Go deeper: read the guide how to cite a journal article in Chicago style.
From the RozContent Study Blog: read the matching study guide on the blog.