Chicago Manual of Style · 17th edition · 2017
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Used by history, art history, theology, music, and most book-publishing house styles. CitePlain emits the current edition by default. We never paywall it.
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Example output
Yeh, Robert W., Linda R. Valsdottir, Michael W. Yeh, Changyu Shen, Daniel B. Kramer, Jordan B. Strom, Eric A. Secemsky, et al. "Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma When Jumping from Aircraft: Randomized Controlled Trial." *BMJ* 363 (2018): k5094. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094.
Edition guide
The Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. Chicago supports two distinct systems: Notes and Bibliography for humanities, and Author-Date for sciences and social sciences. CitePlain emits the Notes and Bibliography form by default.
Quick rules
The first footnote for a source uses full author names and full publication details. Subsequent notes use a shortened form: author last name, short title, page. Bibliography entries invert the first author, sort alphabetically, and end with a period rather than a comma.
First listed author is inverted as Last, First in the bibliography. Subsequent authors stay in natural First Last order. Up to ten authors are listed; beyond ten, list the first seven and add et al. Notes always use natural order: First Last, even for the lead author.
Book titles are italicised. Chapter or article titles inside larger works go in quotation marks. Publisher city, publisher name, year — separated by colons and commas — and finally page numbers when citing a specific section. Editions other than the first are noted in parentheses.
Journal titles are italicised. Volume and issue numbers follow without a comma between them. URLs and DOIs are placed at the end. Chicago 17 added clearer guidance for web-only sources: include the date of last update if the page provides one, and the access date only if no other date is available.
If your field uses Chicago Author-Date instead, the year moves immediately after the author block, and parenthetical in-text citations replace footnotes. The bibliography is renamed Reference List. CitePlain plans to expose this as a toggle in a future release.