Skip to Main Content

Chicago Style: Journal Articles

A guide to writing papers and citing sources in Chicago style.

Formatting

For a References page, your citations need to be double spaced and have a hanging indent. A hanging indent just means that every line after the first in your citation is indented 0.5". 

In Microsoft Word (PC or Mac), highlight your citation and right click on it. Select "Paragraph" in the menu that appears, then under "Indentation" click on the Special drop down and select "Hanging". Make sure the "By" field is set to 0.5".

Journal Articles

Elements for a journal citation (separated by periods) include:

  1. Author: Full name(s) of authors (Lastname, Firstname. All other authors Firstname Lastname).
  2. Article Title: and subtitle, with all major words capitalized(surrounded by quotation marks)
  3. Journal Title: with all major words capitalized (in italicized characters), issue information (volume title and/or number) and publication date in parentheses and ended with a colon afterwards “(month, year):”.
  4. URL/DOI: (for online publications).

The basic format for the citation is:

Author Lastname, Firstname. “Article Title: Subtitle.” Title of Journal vol. title, vol. # (Publication Month, Year): page numbers. URL/DOI.

Examples

Physical Journals

Olson, Hope A. “Codes, Costs, and Critiques: The Organization of Information in Library Quarterly, 1931-2004.” Library Quarterly 76, no. 1

(2006): 20.

Electronic Journals

Lewis, Judith. “’Tis a Misfortune to Be a Great Ladie’: Maternal Mortality in the British Aristocracy, 1558-1959.” Journal of British Studies 37, no. 1

(1998): 26-53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/176034.