Credit your sources: the Chicago Notes and Bibliography format: Home

When your work incorporates words or images not created by you, it’s necessary to credit them clearly. Why?

• TO DISTINGUISH your original work from work you have cited or borrowed.
• TO IDENTIFY what your evidence is, and where you found it
• TO SHARE resources that you found helpful
• TO PROTECT yourself against suspicion of plagiarism

The last of these goals is especially important for students. If you use ideas or words or images or work of any kind without crediting the person who made them, you are committing plagiarism. The punishment for plagiarism can be automatic failure in an assignment, automatic failure for a course, or automatic expulsion from the school.

GET THE INFO FROM YOUR RESOURCE. Collect the information needed for citations from the publication information in the front or back pages of print books or magazines, or directly from the web resource.

GET THE INFO FROM A CATALOG OR INDEX. Library catalog records and records in the Avery Index of Architectural Periodicals often conviently present all the info you need for a citation. Avery also has a citation generator.

INCOMPLETE INFO? When you have only some of the author/date/publisher/place of publication info, use what is available, and insert "Author not identified" or "Publication date not identified" in the format slot.

THE WEBSITE DATE RULE: When a web resource doesn't specify a publication date use "Accessed on MONTH DATE, YEAR", i.e. "Accessed on April 10, 2024" in the date's place.

KEEP TRACK OF YOUR SOURCES. Avoid uncertainty about where your work ends and someone else’s work begins by keeping track of your sources at every stage of your research process. Use a notebook or a document or text yourself.

USE CITATION GENERATORS. Most academic resources have automatic citation generators that will produce citations for whatever you are browsing. Look for buttons with "CITE" or ~ or !. Note that you may have to modify the results to create correct CMOS formats.