Free tool
Chicago citation generator
Get a Chicago author-date reference and in-text citation, 18th edition, from a DOI or a title. No sign-in, and nothing you type is stored.
Generate a Chicago citation
What Chicago style is for
Chicago style comes from The Chicago Manual of Style. It has two systems: notes and bibliography, common in history and the arts, and author-date, common in the sciences and social sciences.
This generator uses the author-date system. In the text you give the author's surname and the year, and the reference list at the end gives the full details. If your course asks for footnotes, it wants the other system, which this tool does not produce.
Example: a journal article in Chicago
Reference list entry
In-text citation
(Poropat 2009)
When you quote, add the page after a comma: (Poropat 2009, 330). With two authors, use and: (Smith and Jones 2020). With four or more, give the first author and et al.
What it can and can't find
The generator looks works up in Crossref and OpenAlex, two large indexes of published research. Journal articles and conference papers with a DOI are covered best.
Websites, most books without a DOI, reports, theses and very new work are often missing, or have thin records. For those, choose “Enter details manually” and type the details from the source itself.
Index records can be wrong or incomplete: a missing issue number, a title in capitals, an author's name spelled another way. Check each citation against the source before you hand it in.
FAQ
- Is the citation generator free?
- Yes. You don't need an account. If you send a lot of searches in a few minutes, the tool asks you to wait a moment before the next one.
- Do you store what I search for?
- No. Your search goes to our server, which looks it up in Crossref and OpenAlex and sends the citations back to your browser. We don't save the search or the results.
- Does it use AI?
- No. It doesn't use a language model. It takes the published record for the work and formats it with standard Citation Style Language (CSL) style files, the same kind many reference managers use.
- Why can't it find my source?
- Crossref and OpenAlex cover journal articles well, but websites, many books, reports, theses and very recent work are often missing. Try the DOI if the work has one, or add an author's surname to the title. If it still isn't found, choose “Enter details manually” and type its author, date, title and the other details from the source.
- Which edition of Chicago does it follow?
- The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, in its author-date system.
- Can it make Chicago footnotes?
- No. It makes author-date references and in-text citations only. For notes and bibliography style, use the reference as a starting point and follow your style guide for the note.
- Why doesn't a book chapter's reference show its page range?
- The Chicago style file the generator uses, written for the 18th edition, leaves a chapter's page range out of the reference list. If your instructor wants the pages, add them after the book title.