15 Key Elements for Notes and Bibliographic Citations

Notes and bibliographic citations include several key elements which are placed in a specific order depending on the type of source you are citing. Asking the following 4 questions helps to identify these key elements:

Author Date Title Location
Who? When? What? Where?
Writer with an idea types on a typewriter in a room with a bookcase filled with books and a globe. 12-calendar month images with coloured band and white space for dates organized in a 4 months by 3 months rectangle. Stack of fiction and non-fiction books ordered from largest to smallest. Cursor hovers over zoomed in web browser address bar showing beginning of web address.

 

Note that you are not expected to memorize Chicago guidelines. Instead, use available resources (Chicago Online Guide, Chicago Manual of Style Online, and this tutorial) to help guide you. Over time you will become more comfortable with creating citations yourself.

 

 

Image Attributions:

“write-writer-type-machine-creative-idea” by mohamed hassan is licensed under CC0 1.0 International.

“[Calendar Months]” by unknown author is licensed under CC0 1.0 International.

“stack-of-food-books-2” by Cannelle is licensed under CC BY 4.0 International.

“512px-Internet2” by Fabio Lanari is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International.

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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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