Chicago footnotes are the heart of the Chicago notes and bibliography system, the documentation style favored in history, the arts, and many humanities disciplines. Instead of dropping a short parenthetical reference into the sentence, you place a small superscript number at the end of the quotation or idea, then give the full source details in a note at the bottom of the page. This guide explains how to format the three forms every Chicago writer must master: the full first note, the shortened subsequent note, and the bibliography entry. You will see worked book, journal article, and website examples in all three forms, along with the punctuation rules that trip people up.
Two Chicago systems, one guide
Chicago style offers two documentation methods. The first is author-date, which uses parenthetical citations much like APA or Harvard referencing. The second is notes and bibliography, which uses footnotes or endnotes plus a bibliography. This article covers the notes and bibliography method, since that is what most people mean when they search for Chicago footnotes. If you are unsure which version your instructor wants, ask, because the formatting differs in important ways. For a broader overview of the whole style, see our Chicago style guide, and if you are weighing it against other systems, our explainer on citation styles lays out the landscape.
Footnotes versus endnotes
A footnote sits at the bottom of the page where the citation appears. An endnote collects all notes together at the end of the chapter or document under a heading such as Notes. The content and formatting of the note text are identical either way, so everything below applies to both. Most word processors insert and renumber notes automatically through an Insert Footnote command, which keeps the superscript numbers in sequence as you edit.
The superscript number and its placement
Each note is signaled by a superscript Arabic numeral in the text. Numbering runs consecutively through the paper, starting at 1. Place the number at the end of the sentence or clause that contains the borrowed material, and put it after all punctuation, including the period, comma, and closing quotation mark. The one exception is the dash, where the number goes before it. The matching number at the foot of the page is usually full size and followed by a period, then the note text.
Memory shaped how the city rebuilt itself after the fire.1
As one historian put it, the rebuilding was “an act of collective forgetting.”2
Full first note versus shortened note versus bibliography
The first time you cite a source, give a full note with complete publication details. Every time you cite that same source afterward, use a shortened note. At the end of the paper, list every source once in the bibliography. Three differences matter most. First, the author name is in normal order (First Last) in notes but inverted (Last, First) in the bibliography. Second, notes separate the main elements with commas and place publication facts in parentheses, while bibliography entries separate elements with periods. Third, notes often end with a specific page number, while bibliography entries give the full page range only for parts of larger works.
Book in all three forms
Full note: 1. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 142.
Shortened note: 2. Lepore, These Truths, 207.
Bibliography: Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.
Notice the punctuation. In the full note, commas join the author, title, and page, and the city, publisher, and year sit inside parentheses with no comma before the opening parenthesis. In the bibliography, periods replace those commas and the parentheses disappear. The shortened note keeps only the author last name, a short version of the title (italicized for a book), and the page. To build any of these without hand-tracking commas, our Chicago citation generator produces the note and bibliography forms together.
Journal article in all three forms
Full note: 3. Caroline Winterer, “Where Is America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 599, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244312000273.
Shortened note: 4. Winterer, “Where Is America,” 601.
Bibliography: Winterer, Caroline. “Where Is America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 597–623. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244312000273.
Article titles take quotation marks, while the journal name is italicized. The full note gives the single page you are citing, but the bibliography gives the full page range of the article. Include a DOI or stable URL when one exists. For more on this source type, see our walkthrough on how to cite a journal article.
Website in all three forms
Full note: 5. “About the Hancock Collection,” National Portrait Gallery, accessed June 2, 2026, https://npg.si.edu/about/hancock.
Shortened note: 6. “About the Hancock Collection.”
Bibliography: National Portrait Gallery. “About the Hancock Collection.” Accessed June 2, 2026. https://npg.si.edu/about/hancock.
For online content without a publication date, include an access date. When a page has no individual author, lead with the title in the note and with the site owner in the bibliography. Our guide to how to cite a website covers tricky cases such as missing dates, and our piece on citing a source with no author explains how to alphabetize titles in the bibliography.
Ibid. and the modern shortened-note preference
Older Chicago practice used the Latin abbreviation Ibid. (meaning “in the same place”) when consecutive notes cited the same source. The 17th and 18th editions of the manual now discourage Ibid. and recommend the shortened note instead, because Ibid. becomes confusing in digital documents where notes move around. So rather than writing a bare Ibid. for note 7, repeat the short form.
Older style: 7. Ibid., 215.
Preferred style: 7. Lepore, These Truths, 215.
If you do still use Ibid., it always refers to the source in the immediately preceding note, it is capitalized at the start of a note, and it takes a period because it is an abbreviation. When the page differs, add the new page after a comma.
Punctuation and formatting rules to remember
- Notes use commas between elements; bibliography entries use periods.
- Author names appear as First Last in notes and Last, First in the bibliography.
- Notes are numbered and run in document order; the bibliography is unnumbered and alphabetized by author surname.
- Book and journal titles are italicized with em styling; article, chapter, and webpage titles take quotation marks.
- Use a hanging indent in the bibliography, the same look explained in our hanging indent guide, while notes use a first-line indent.
- Place the superscript number after closing punctuation in the text.
Common mistakes
- Using the full note every time. After the first citation of a source, switch to the shortened form.
- Swapping note and bibliography punctuation, such as putting periods between note elements or commas in a bibliography entry.
- Forgetting to invert the author name in the bibliography.
- Confusing Chicago footnotes with Chicago author-date in-text citations. If you want parenthetical references instead, review the difference in our overview of in-text citations.
- Leaving a stray Ibid. after editing reorders your notes, which is exactly why the shortened note is now preferred.
- Mixing Chicago with the closely related Turabian variant designed for students; if your course requires it, use the Turabian citation generator instead.
Putting it together
Chicago footnotes feel fussy at first, but they follow a clear logic: a full note introduces a source, shortened notes recall it, and one tidy bibliography entry records it for the reader. Master the three forms and the comma versus period distinction, drop Ibid. in favor of the shortened note, and your apparatus will stay consistent even through heavy revision. When you are juggling many sources at once, let the Chicago citation generator handle the punctuation so you can focus on the writing, and browse our how to cite sources hub for any source type you have not seen yet.