CitationWithSourcesHow formats are sourced

Chicago Author-Date Citation Generator

Fill in what you know about the source and get the Chicago (author-date) entry plus its matching in-text form. Blank fields are simply left out rather than leaving stray punctuation behind.

Authors

No personal author? Leave these blank and use the organisation field below.

Reference entry

Baniya, Sweta, and Stuart Weech. 2019. "Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning." Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement 6 (1): 11–16. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316979

In-text

(Baniya and Weech 2019, 11–16)

Formatted as Chicago (author-date). Italics are shown as italics here and stripped when you copy, so the text pastes cleanly into a word processor where you can re-apply them.

A worked example

A two-author journal article with a DOI, formatted as Chicago (author-date). This is generated by the same code the tool above uses, so it is never out of step with the generator.

Reference

Baniya, Sweta, and Stuart Weech. 2019. "Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning." Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement 6 (1): 11–16. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316979

In-text

(Baniya and Weech 2019, 11–16)

The same style applied to a single-author book, where the fields available are quite different — no volume, no issue, no DOI, but a publisher instead:

Gleick, James. 1987. Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin.

In-text: (Gleick 1987)

Where these rules come from

Citation formats are only useful if they match what the style body actually publishes, so each rule here is transcribed from a cited source rather than written from memory:

Frequently Asked Questions

How is author-date different from Chicago's notes system?

The year moves. In author-date it follows the author directly — Binder, Amy J., and Jeffrey L. Kidder. 2022. — and the in-text citation is a short parenthetical like (Binder and Kidder 2022, 117–18). The notes system keeps the year with the other publication facts and cites via footnotes instead.

Does the reference list differ from a bibliography?

Yes, mainly in the year's position and the heading. Author-date calls it a reference list and puts the date immediately after the author so a reader scanning for (Author Year) can find the entry quickly.

Where do these formatting rules come from?

Every rule on this page is transcribed from the published Chicago (author-date) guidance listed in the sources box below, and the site's test suite reproduces those sources' own worked examples exactly. If a change ever stopped matching a real published citation, the tests would fail.

Should I check the output before submitting it?

Yes. A generator handles the common shapes of a source well, but real bibliographies contain awkward cases — a chapter in a translated edition, a report with a corporate author and a series number, a source with no date. Treat the output as a well-formed draft and check anything unusual against your style manual or your institution's guidance.

Other citation styles

Switching styles changes more than punctuation — name order, date position and title capitalisation all move, so the same source looks quite different in each.