Primary Source Analysis Paper Assignments

CHICAGOSTYLECITATIONS.txt

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CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE DOCUMENTATION

Prepared by Vanessa Weller, History WAC Fellow, 2011-2012

The aim of this workshop is to familiarize you with basic Chicago Manual of Style citation formatting. We will cover common secondary source citation formats—for both footnotes and bibliographies—and will also briefly look at how to cite some kinds of primary sources.

The discipline of History uses Chicago Style documentation for citations. Chicago Style differs from MLA and APA in a number of ways, and it is important to be diligent about using the correct citation style as it is a hallmark of good scholarship. In order for your work to be taken seriously, you need to be able to comply with the standards of your discipline.

This guide will review both bibliographic and footnote citation formats. Note the differences in these formats and be careful not to confuse them. Unless your instructors direct you otherwise, it is safe to assume that they will expect you to submit both footnotes and a bibliography for a documented essay or research paper assigned in a History course.

Why do we need to document our sources?

A sound historical argument will rely on authentic historical (primary) sources to provide sound evidence of the author’s allegations. Historical writing also needs to acknowledge other research done in the field (historiographic, or secondary sources) and to properly attribute that work to its author(s). If historians fail to properly cite their sources they are libel for plagiarism.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism takes many forms. Broadly, an author may commit plagiarism when they make reference to another work without properly giving credit to the author(s) that produced that work. This may be done inadvertently or intentionally, but in either case, the offense lies in the misrepresentation of someone else’s work as your own. In order to avoid plagiarizing another’s work, you must be diligent about citing your sources.

When do we need to document our sources?

It is important to be conscientious about documenting your sources. Therefore, whenever you incorporate information from another source, you should provide a citation for it. This does not mean that you should footnote every sentence. On the contrary, footnotes should only be used when you are providing new information to a reader or when you are directly referencing the work of another author. General knowledge—information of which you might reasonably expect a reader to already be aware—does not need to be cited. As a general rule of thumb, the evidence you offer to substantiate your argument should be footnoted. If you are confused about when to use a footnote ask a writing tutor, a TA, a librarian or a teacher. And err on the side of caution—it is better to have too many than too few citations because, as you know, failing to properly attribute credit to a source makes you libel for plagiarism.

How many citations is too many?

Of course, there is no set number of citations that you should provide per essay. But, you should be aware of certain techniques for combining or abridging citations, when appropriate. For some of these techniques, see “Multiple sources in one footnote,” “Repeated use of sources,” and “Ibid” listed below.

What is a footnote?

A footnote is a way of providing the citation information for a historical or historiographic source. They are required when a source is quoted or paraphrased. A footnote provides both publishing information and, sometimes, contextual information to further explain the reference made in the body of the paper.

Footnotes are listed at the bottom of the page on which a source is referenced and are marked with a superscript numeral in the paragraph—usually at the end of the sentence—in which the source is referenced.

How do I make a footnote?

Most word processing programs have a function that will automatically insert the footnote number, provide space at the bottom of the page for the citation, and keep track of the order of your footnotes.

In Microsoft Word, place your cursor where you want the number for the footnote to appear, after the text that you intend to cite. Then click on the INSERT menu in the toolbar, and then the FOOTNOTE option listed under INSERT, then your cursor will automatically be moved to a space at the bottom of the page in which you can type the citation information. In some versions of MS Word you will need to click on REFERNCES under the INSERT menu before you click FOOTNOTE. In other versions there will be a REFERENCES menu in the toolbar. Familiarize yourself with the word processing program that you are using so that you are comfortable doing this. DO NOT simply write a number at the end of the sentence and insert the citation as a “FOOTER”. This will make the citation appear on every page of your essay and will confuse your reader.

What information is included in a footnote?

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, section 14.15, “Basic Structure of a Note”:

“A footnote or an endnote generally lists the author, title, and facts of publication, in that order. Elements are separated by commas; the facts of publication are enclosed in parentheses. Authors’ names are presented in standard order (first name first). Titles are capitalized headline-style (see 8.157 ), unless they are in a foreign language (see 11.3 ). Titles of larger works (e.g., books and journals) are italicized; titles of smaller works (e.g., chapters, articles) or unpublished works are presented in roman and enclosed in quotation marks (see 8.161 ). Such terms as editor/edited by, translator/translated by, volume, and edition are abbreviated.“

What information is included in a bibliographic entry?

As per Chicago Manual of Style, section 14.16, “Basic structure of a bibliography entry”:

“In a bibliography entry the elements are separated by periods rather than by commas; the facts of publication are not enclosed in parentheses; and the first-listed author’s name, according to which the entry is alphabetized in the bibliography, is usually inverted (last name first). As in a note, titles are capitalized headline-style unless they are in a foreign language; titles of larger works (e.g., books and journals) are italicized; and titles of smaller works (e.g., chapters, articles) or unpublished works are presented in roman and enclosed in quotation marks. Noun forms such as editor, translator, volume, and edition are abbreviated, but verb forms such as edited by and translated by—abbreviated in a note—are spelled out in a bibliography. (Cf. 14.15 .)”

Where do I find “publication information”?

For a book, the editor or author’s name and the title of the book can be found on the front cover and on an interior title page in the first few pages of the book. The date and place of publication and the name of the publisher can be found on the copyright page, usually on the backside of the title page in the first few pages of the book.

For an article, the publication information is usually provided by the search engine that you used to locate the article, or on a cover page for the article.

Multiple Sources in One Footnote

You may want or need to reference several sources in one footnote. This is warranted in the case that your prose incorporates work from several sources. In many cases multiple sources can be listed like so:

1 Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Historical Review 96 (Apr., 1991): 462; Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” JAH, 91, No. 4 (Mar., 2004): 1259; Eric Arnesen, “Reconsidering the Long Civil Rights Movement,” Historically Speaking 10, No. 2 (Apr., 2009): 33; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The Long Movement as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, No. 2 (Spring 2007): 272.

Repeated Use of Sources

If you refer to a particular source for a second time you may truncate the publication information in your second and subsequent footnotes. Generally, you may provide only the author’s last name and the main portion of the title of their work (i.e., you may omit the sub-heading—the portion of a title that comes after a colon) and appropriate page numbers. It might look something like this:

1 Coleman, Death is a Social Disease, 79.

Ibid

If you refer to the same source—and only that source—several times in a row, you may further truncate the footnote. The first footnote should provide the full publication information; the second footnote may follow the abbreviated format shown above; the third and any immediately subsequent footnotes may use simply read “Ibid” and the appropriate page numbers. It might look something like this:

1 David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), 45.

2 Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, 90.

3 Ibid, 191.

Note: You may ONLY use “Ibid” if your repeated references to one source appear in direct succession. If you refer to the same source again later, you must use the abbreviated format shown in “Repeated Use of Sources”. Also, be wary of using “Ibid” too frequently. If you have several references to the same source in a row it is an indication that you are relying to heavily on this source, which may be a symptom of an imbalanced argument (i.e., that you are not weighing the evidence of multiple sources against each other) or that you are relinquishing your own voice as a narrator to that of your sources.

Bibliography/Works Cited Formatting

In addition to your footnotes, you will often be required to provide a list of all of your sources at the end of your paper, in either a bibliography of works cited page. Bibliographic citations are formatted slightly differently from footnotes. The major differences are that in contrast to footnotes, bibliographic entries list an author’s last name before their first and use different punctuation (periods instead of commas between the author’s name and the title of the item, as well as between the title of the item and the publication information, and bibliographic entries do not use parentheses). See the list of “Commonly Cited Sources” at the end of this handout for examples.

Note that bibliographies must be alphabetized by author’s last name.

Multiple sources by the same author

You may use two or more source written by the same author, in which case you can use an abbreviation in your bibliography, replacing the author’s name with five dashes as follows:

Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: North Carolina University Press, 1998.

-----. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Commonly Cited Sources:

Books with one author F: Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 99–100.

B: Pollan, Michael. The Ominvore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Books with more than one author

F: Lesley Doyal and Imogen Pennell, The Political Economy of Health (London: Pluto Press, 1979), 86.

B: Doyal, Lesley and Imogen Pennell. The Political Economy of Health. London: Pluto Press, 1979.

Books with an editor F: Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 32.

B: Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Chapter in an edited book

F: Dana Alston and Nicole Brown, “Global Threats to People of Color” in Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, ed. Robert D. Bullard (Boston: South End Press, 1993):187.

B: Alston, Dana and Nicole Brown. “Global Threats to People of Color.” In Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, 179-194. Edited by Robert D. Bullard. Boston: South End Press, 1993.

Reprinted Editions

F1: Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, 3rd ed. (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1986; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987), 26.

F2: Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, rev. ed. (1985; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 152–53.

B1: Bernhardt, Peter. The Rose’s Kiss: A Natural History of Flowers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. First published 1999 by Island Press.

B2: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. 1836. Facsimile of the first edition, with an introduction by Jaroslav Pelikan. Boston: Beacon, 1985.

B3: Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1925. Reprinted with preface and notes by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Collier Books, 1992.

Edition other than the first

F: William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed. (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2000).

B: Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed. New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Article in an academic journal F: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, No. 4 (Mar., 2004): 1233-63.

B: Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” Journal of American History 91, No. 4 (Mar., 2004): 1233-63.

Article in a newspaper or magazine

F: Daniel Mendelsohn, “But Enough about Me,” New Yorker, January 25, 2010, 68.

Website

Film or documentary

F: Style Wars: the Origin of Hip Hop, directed by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (1983; New York: Plexifilm, 2003), DVD, 69 min.

B: Style Wars: the Origin of Hip Hop. Directed by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant. 1983, original release. New York: Plexifilm, 2003. DVD, 69 minutes.

Books Downloaded from a Library or Bookseller

F: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), Microsoft Reader e-book, chap. 23.

B: Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Penguin Classics, 2008. Microsoft Reader e-book, chap. 23.

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