Plagiarism Prevention & Citation Sources: Chicago-Paper Sections

Major Paper Sections

Title Page 

• Class papers will either include a title page or include the title on the first page of the text. Use the following guidelines should your instructor or context require a title page:  
  • The title should be centered a third of the way down the page. 
  • Your name and class information should follow several lines later. 
  • For subtitles, end the title line with a colon and place the subtitle on the line below the title.

CMS Title Page

• Different practices apply for theses and dissertation (see Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, ad Dissertations [7^th ed.], 373-408). 
•  

Main Body

• Titles mentioned in the text, notes, or bibliography are capitalized “headline-style,” meaning first words of titles and subtitles and any important words thereafter should be capitalized. 
• Titles in the text as well as in notes and bibliographies are treated with quotation marks or italics based on the type of work they name. 
  • Book and periodical titles (titles of larger works) should be italicized. 
  • Article and chapter titles (titles of shorter works) should be enclosed in double quotation marks. 
  • Otherwise, take a minimalist approach to capitalization.
    • Lowercase terms used to describe periods, for example, except in the case of proper nouns (e.g., “the colonial period,” vs. “the Victorian era”).

• A prose quotation of five or more lines should be “blocked.” The block quotation is singled-spaced and takes no quotation marks, but you should leave an extra line space immediately before and after. Indent the entire quotation .5” (the same as you would the start of a new paragraph). 
   

  Rose eloquently sums up his argument in the following quotation:

  In a society of control, a politics of conduct is 
      designed into the fabric of existence itself, into the
      organization of space, time, visibility, circuits of 
      communication. And these enwrap each individual life 
      decision and action—about labour [sic], purchases, debts, 
      credits, lifestyle, sexual contracts and the like—in a web 
      of incitements, rewards, current sanctions and foreboding  
      of future sanctions which serve to enjoin citizens to 
      maintain particular types of control over their conduct. 
      These assemblages which entail the securitization of 
      identity are not unified, but dispersed, not hierarchical 
      but rhizomatic, not totalized but connected in a web or 
      relays and relations.(246)

References

• Label the first page of your back matter, and your comprehensive list of sources, “Bibliography” (for Notes and Bibliography style) or “References” (for Author Date style). 
• Leave two blank lines between “Bibliography” or “References” and your first entry. 
• Leave one blank line between remaining entries. 
• List entries in letter-by-letter alphabetical order according to the first word in each entry. 
• Use “and,” not an ampersand, “&,” for multi-author entries. 
  • For two to three authors, write out all names. 
  • For four to ten authors, write out all names in the bibliography but only the first author’s name plus “et al.” in notes and parenthetical citations. 
  • When a source has no identifiable author, cite it by its title, both on the references page and in shortened form (up to four keywords from that title) in parenthetical citations throughout the text. 
  • Write out publishers’ names in full. 
  • Do not use access dates unless publication dates are unavailable.  
  • If you cannot ascertain the publication date of a printed work, use the abbreviation “n.d.”
  • Provide DOIs instead of URLs whenever possible. 
  • If you cannot name a specific page number when called for, you have other options: section (sec.), equation (eq.), volume (vol.), or note (n.).

CMS References Page

Footnotes

• Note numbers should begin with “1” and follow consecutively throughout a given paper. 
• In the text, note numbers are superscripted. 
  • Note numbers should be placed at the end of the clause or sentence to which they refer and should be placed after any and all punctuation. 
  • In the notes themselves, note numbers are full-sized, not raised, and followed by a period (superscripting note numbers in the notes themselves is also acceptable). 
  • The first line of a footnote is indented .5” from the left margin. 
  • Subsequent lines within a footnote should be formatted flush left. 
  • Leave an extra line space between footnotes. 
  • Place commentary after documentation when a footnote contains both, separated by a period. 
    • In parenthetical citation, separate documentation from brief commentary with a semicolon. 
    • Do not repeat the hundreds digit in a page range if it does not change from the beginning to the end of the range. 

For more information on footnotes, please see CMS NB Sample Paper.

Headings

Chicago has an optional system of five heading levels.