Citation, Documentation of Sources

A. This debate crops up every now and then. The problem is that URLs are designed to work in the background, where they facilitate links (e.g., to CMOS Shop Talk); they weren’t intended to appear in the run of ordinary text. When they do, Chicago allows not only for periods (as at the end of a footnote, in part to accommodate any text that follows) but also for commas, as in https://cmosshoptalk.com/, and parentheses (cmosshoptalk.com)—and so on for other punctuation. This approach, which prioritizes the surrounding text over the URL, is also used for MLA style, whether in text or notes. APA, on the other hand, leaves out the period after a URL at the end of a reference. We have no plans to change our recommendations, but editors who follow Chicago (or MLA) can help by double-checking that the links—minus any surrounding punctuation—point to the right place.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. For the citation, use the date of the numbered journal issue rather than the date the article was originally published online, unless the article has not yet been assigned to a numbered issue. For example, here’s a reference list entry and parenthetical citation for an article in Freshwater Science that was received by the journal on June 17, 2019, accepted for publication on December 4, 2020, and published ahead of print on April 16, 2021—but not yet assigned to an issue:

Savoy, Philip, Emily Bernhardt, Lily Kirk, Matthew J. Cohen, and James B. Heffernan. 2021. “A Seasonally Dynamic Model of Light at the Stream Surface.” Freshwater Science. Published ahead of print, April 16. https://doi.org/10.1086/714270.

(Savoy et al. 2021)

Here’s an article received by that same journal on December 8, 2019, accepted on August 3, 2020, published online on February 12, 2021, and assigned to a numbered issue for March 2021:

Vanlandingham, Amanda L., Richard H. Walker, Adam Alford, and Sally A. Entrekin. 2021. “Intermittency Mediates Macroinvertebrate and Crayfish Effects on Leaf Breakdown in Temperate Headwater Streams.” Freshwater Science 40, no. 1 (March): 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/713094.

(Vanlandingham et al. 2021)

Note that many journal publishers include the dates of receipt, acceptance, and online (or ahead-of-print) publication as part of the record for an article once it’s been assigned a place in a numbered issue. If any of those dates are relevant, they can be discussed or noted in the text. The citation, on the other hand, will be most useful if it points to the numbered issue. For preprints, which are cited separately, see CMOS 14.173.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. When citing an item in a museum collection, it is usually enough simply to describe it either in a caption or in the text and give credit to the museum. Museum websites usually do most of the work for you. For example, here’s a public-domain image from the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Borrowing from the museum’s information for the image (which does not cite a creator), your caption might read as follows:

Japanese censer, 19th century (Edo period), stoneware with inlaid design (Yatsushiro ware), 8.3 × 11.1 × 5.7 cm (ht. × rim diam. × foot diam.), Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the text your description would be more straightforward: “The censer, a nineteenth-century example from the Edo period (1615–1868) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, . . .” If the lack of a known creator is relevant to the discussion, that can also be mentioned. Artworks don’t usually need to be included in a bibliography, but if you were to include them for any reason, the entry for this one could be listed under the description of the work:

Japanese censer. 19th century. Stoneware with inlaid design (Yatsushiro ware), 8.3 × 11.1 × 5.7 cm (ht. × rim diam. × foot diam.). Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/62537.

For additional examples, see CMOS 14.235. Note that images that are not in the public domain may require permission before they can be reproduced in your work (see CMOS 4.95–105).

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. A curriculum vitae, like other such informal documents, can usually be cited in the text or in a note rather than in a bibliography or reference list. Because CVs are typically updated from time to time, it can be helpful to frame your mention with a date: “As of April 2021, Professor Smith’s CV listed more than thirty publications in peer-reviewed journals.” In other cases, a date may be unnecessary: “According to her CV, she taught at a high school (Gymnasium) in Göttingen.”

In either case, provide any additional details that readers would need in order to find the document, as in the following note:

1. “Faculty Profiles,” Department of Art History, University of Chicago, URL.

If, however, a teacher or publisher requires a more formal citation, adapt the following examples to suit:

Bibliography:

Smith, Joan. Curriculum Vitae. “Faculty Profiles,” Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Accessed April 6, 2021. URL.

Reference list (author-date):

Smith, Joan. n.d. Curriculum Vitae. “Faculty Profiles,” Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Accessed April 6, 2021. URL.

For access dates, which Chicago requires only for sources without a date of publication or revision, see CMOS 14.12. For the use of “n.d.” (no date) in author-date style, see CMOS 15.50.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. We like your suggestion, which we would style as in the following note:

1. Jaime Smith, “Title of Presentation” (ABCD Annual Conference, April 6, 2021, virtual).

Note that there’s no need to indicate the platform (Zoom etc.); if that’s somehow relevant to the discussion, authors can mention it in the text.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. It’s optional. Normally, if you’ve mentioned the original year in your text—or provided some idea of the period during which the essay was composed or published—you won’t need to also include it in the citation. Moreover, it’s not always easy to pin down the exact date of an original essay—particularly if there were several published versions or if it hadn’t been published at all.

But if you do know the date and want to add it for additional context, here’s how you might style it:

Numbered note and bibliography entry:

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Coming of John,” in The Making of the American Essay, ed. John D’Agata (1903; Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016).

Du Bois, W. E. B. 2016. “Of the Coming of John.” In The Making of the American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, 253–68. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. Originally published as chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903).

Reference list entry and parenthetical citation (author-date):

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903) 2016. “Of the Coming of John.” In The Making of the American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, 253–68. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

(Du Bois [1903] 2016)

For more examples, see CMOS 14.114 (notes and bibliography) and CMOS 15.40 (author-date).

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. One approach would be to add a portion of the quoted text to a note where a page number or other locator would usually go. For example, let’s quote and cite the following sentence from a post on CMOS Shop Talk: “A serif is a small projecting line or wedge on the main stroke of a letter.”¹

1. “Key Terms Every Editor Should Know,” CMOS Shop Talk, November 10, 2020, at “A serif is . . . ,” https://​cmosshoptalk​.com​/2020​/11​/10​/key-terms-every-editor-should-know/.

Users who follow the link should be able to use the Find feature in any browser to get to the cited text (i.e., by searching for the words before the ellipsis). For this example, we’ve used the first three words rather than the whole sentence, after testing to make sure those three words are unique on that page.

But in a case like that—where you’re citing the source of a direct quotation presented verbatim in your own text—repeating a snippet of that text in the note as shown above would be overkill. If, on the other hand, your note doesn’t refer to a direct quote, this strategy could work well, particularly when you need to cite a page with lots of text but no paragraph numbers or section titles.

A promising alternative solution to the problem of getting readers to the right place in an unpaginated document is Text Fragments, introduced for Google’s Chrome browser in 2020. This feature allows you to copy a snippet of text from a web page and append it to the end of that page’s URL. This enhanced URL is designed to return the same page but scrolled to the text fragment (highlighted in yellow). For example, if you paste “A serif is a small projecting line or wedge on the main stroke of a letter” to the end of the URL in the example above (after “#:~:text=”), you’ll get the following link:

https://​​cmosshoptalk​.com​​/2020​​/11​​/10​​/key-terms-every-editor-should-know​/#:~:text=A​​%20serif​​%20is​​%20a​​%20small​​​%20projecting​​%20line​​%20or​​%20wedge​​%20on​​%20the​​%20main​​%20stroke​​%20of​​%20a​​%20letter

There are, however, two problems with this approach: (1) it’s not a good option when you need to express a URL as text rather than as an embedded link (mostly because spaces in URLs are automatically replaced with “%20”), and (2) as of March 2021, this feature is supported only in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Still, it’s a handy tool to keep in mind for uses other than source citation.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. Yes, you generally should give credit to a translator, whether human or machine. This could be done either in the acknowledgments or, for example, in a “Note on Translations” at the beginning of the book. But the easiest option is to footnote the first instance. For example,

1. Except where noted, this and other translations from the original Portuguese into English were generated by DeepL and edited by the author.

Remember also to credit yourself for any translations that you do without help (e.g., “my translation”; see CMOS 11.14).

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. The “and” is optional in either case. Think of a footnote as a sentence. It’s punctuated like one, though typically it’s presented in the form of a fragment. In other words, this:

1. Author Name, Title of Book (Facts of Publication), 33.

is equivalent to this:

1. See Author Name, Title of Book (Facts of Publication), 33.

That “See” in the second example, which is understood in the first, makes explicit the fact that a note is an imperative sentence. When additional sources are added, “and” may be similarly understood:

1. [See] Author Name, Title of Book (Facts of Publication), 33; [and (or “and see”)] Another Author, Another Title (Different Facts of Publication), 121–22.

Though it can save space and reduce repetition to omit these words, there’s no reason they can’t be included if desired—or expanded on as needed:

1. See Author Name, Title of Book (Facts of Publication), 33. For a different perspective, see Another Author, Another Title (Different Facts of Publication), 121–22.

Back to “and.” If in doubt, add it; the conjunction can help readers identify the end of one source and the beginning of another. But try to be consistent in your approach across any single document.

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]

A. There is if you let Microsoft Word or Google Docs do its thing. And if you’re smart enough to do that—in other words, if you already know to take advantage of the automated notes feature in your word processor—you might as well not interfere, particularly as there’s no apparent option to change this default behavior in either application. Consider also that such spaces may help readers identify footnotes more easily (which is why we use them at CMOS Shop Talk). But either choice, space or no space, is acceptable in a manuscript. Publishers who follow Chicago style will have no trouble adapting either one to a regular number (not a superscript) followed by a period and a space (see CMOS 14.24).

[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]