4 Exploring Source Types

To identify the correct Chicago citation elements needed for your footnotes or endnotes and your bibliography, you first need to know what type of source you have. Looking at a source’s visual clues can help you figure this out.

A source can be in different formats. For example:

  • a book can be in print or available online as an ebook
  • an article can be in a print journal or available online in a Library database or on a journal webpage
  • a video can be on a DVD or streamed online
  • and so on…

Other sources exist only electronically, such as blogs or websites and their individual webpages.

It can be a bit confusing figuring out what type of source you have. To help, we will go through some examples of source types and clues to look for.

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Chicago Manual of Style by Ulrike Kestler and Sigrid Kargut is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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