Interviews and Personal Communication

In citations for interviews and personal communications, the name of the person interviewed or the person from whom the communication is received should be listed first. This is followed by the name of the interviewer or recipient, if given, and supplemented by details regarding the place and date of the interview/communication. Unpublished interviews and personal communications (such as face-to-face or telephone conversations, letters, emails, or text messages) are best cited in-text or in notes rather than in the bibliography. Published interviews should be cited like periodical articles or book chapters.

Interviews with anonymous sources can be cited without including the name of the source–e.g. “anonymous informant #3” or “recreational psilocybin user”–but you must explain in the text why you are not giving the name of your source.

UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEWS

Note: If the interview is unpublished, but there is a transcript or recording available, you should include information as to where said transcript/recording can be found. This can be as simple as a URL, or as complex as a location in an institutional archive; the latter is shown in the example below.

N:

1. Alex Smith (retired plumber) in discussion with the author, January 2017.

2. Frederick L. Hovde, interview by Robert B. Eckles, July 23, 1972, interview 8, transcript and recording, Purdue University Office of Publications Oral History Program collection, MSO 2, Series 1, Sub-Series 16, File 8, Purdue University Archives and Special Collections.

PUBLISHED OR BROADCAST INTERVIEWS

An interview published in a print medium is cited much like a periodical, as seen in the first example. An interview broadcast on television, radio, or similar has its own format, as follows:

N:

3. Firstname Lastname, interview by Firstname Lastname, Title of Broadcasting Program, Publisher, date.

B:

Lastname Firstname. Title of Broadcasting Program. By Firstname Lastname. Publisher, date.

This is shown in the second example.

N:

4. Natasha Trethewy, “Dissection and Other Kinds of Love,” interview by Lindsey Alexander, Sycamore Review, no. 24 (Winter/Spring 2012): 35.

5. Carrie Rodriguez, interview by Cuz Frost, Acoustic Café, 88.3 WGWG FM, November 20, 2008.

B:

Trethewy, Natasha. “Dissection and Other Kinds of Love.” By Lindsey Alexander. Sycamore Review, no. 24 (Winter/Spring 2012): 31-45.

Rodriguez, Carrie. Acoustic Café. By Cuz Frost. 88.3 WGWG FM, November 20, 2008.

PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS

Personal communications are usually referenced within the text or a note. They rarely appear as bibliographic entries. Do not include the e-mail address or other contact information through which the communication was conducted unless it is necessary and you have the source’s permission.

N:

1. Patricia Burns, email message to author, December 15, 2017.

Information pulled from: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/interviews_personal_communication.html

General Guidelines for Public and Unpublished Materials

Notes and bibliographic entries for public documents, like other documents, should include the elements needed to locate the items. These essential elements often include the following:

• Country, city, state, province, county, etc.
• Legislative body, executive department, court, bureau, board commission or committee, etc.
• Subsidiary divisions
• Title, if any, of the document or collection
• Individual author (editor or compiler), if given
• Report number or any other identification necessary or useful in finding the specific document
• Publisher, if different from issuing body

Footnote or Endnote (N):

1. Firstname Lastname, “Title of Document” (source type identifier, Place of Publication, year of publication), page number(s).

Corresponding Bibliographic Entry (B):

Lastname, Firstname. “Title of Document.” Source type identifier, Place of Publication, year of publication.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Legal Materials and Government Documents

Legal materials and other government documents should be cited using footnotes, endnotes, and/or citation sentences (with clauses including the same information required in a footnote). Print copies of the sources tend to be preferred to digital, though verified digital sources are acceptable.

When writing for law journals or other legal publications, these sources are not usually required to be cited in a bibliography or on a references page. Citation sentences alone are an acceptable form of citation, so long as the document has only a few legal citations (for more information, see The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., sections 14.269-305 and 15.58.)

Court Decisions and Cases

Notes for court cases should include case name, number, volume number, abbreviated name(s) of reporter, and, in parentheses, the abbreviated name of the court and the date. Case names written in full are typeset in roman, while in subsequent shortened citations the short form of the case name is italicized. Citations are assumed to refer to decisions as a whole unless a particular page is cited using “at” (see example 3 below). The CMOS offers the following note examples in section 14.276:

1. United States v. Christmas, 222 F.3d 141, 145 (4th Cir. 2000).

2. Profit Sharing Plan v. Mbank Dallas, N.A., 683 F. Supp. 592 (N.D. Tex. 1988).

3. Christmas, 222 F.3d at 145. The court also noted that under United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 7 (1989), police may briefly detain a person without probable cause if the officer believes criminal activity “may be afoot.” Christmas, 222 F.3d at 143; see also Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).

Theses and Dissertations

Thesis and dissertation titles appear in quotation marks, not in italics, but are cited in all other ways like books. Include name, title, type of document, academic institution, and date, in that order. If the item was found online, include a URL or DOI (see guidelines for citing online sources).

N:

1. Tara Hostetler, “Bodies at War: Bacteriology and the Carrier Narratives of ‘Typhoid Mary’” (master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2007), 15-16.

B:

Hostetler, Tara. "Bodies at War: Bacteriology and the Carrier Narratives of ‘Typhoid Mary.’” Master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2007.

Letters and Unpublished Manuscripts

Letters and unpublished materials that have not been archived may be cited like other unpublished material, with information on location replaced by wording such as “private collection of Trinity Overmyer” or “in the author’s possession.” The location is not mentioned.

Information pulled from: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/legal_public_and_unpublished_materials.html

Bluebook Citation for Legal Materials

The Bluebook style guide is used in the American legal profession for citation of all relevant sources. Additionally, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends its use for all citation of legal material. What follows is a summary of the basics. It should be noted that the Bluebook system goes into significant complexity on most of these points, but the following is the level of detail it recommends for the basic needs of, e.g., a student.

It should also be noted that, depending on the document, underlines may be substituted for italics and vice versa – as long as one is consistent.

Short Form Citations

Once you have cited a given authority in full once, you may use a short-form citation subsequently. The specific content of a short form citation is flexible, but varies by the type of authority being cited. Acceptable short forms for a given citation will be covered in each entry.

Short forms may also use id. to indicate that this citation is from the same authority as the previous.  

Court Cases

Citation of a court case requires the following components:

• The name of the case
• The source where you found the case
• The court where the case was decided
• The year the decision took place

The citation may be followed by other parenthetical information, such as a brief explanation of the case’s relevance or a quotation from that case. This may be followed by subsequent history of the case, e.g., later affirmations of the decision, if you so choose.

In citing the name of the case, one generally summarizes. If there are multiple plaintiffs or multiple defendants, one only lists the first party in each category. Moreover, the names of individuals within the case name are shortened to surname only – no first or middle names, no initials, no “aka” or “et al.”

In general, one should abbreviate to the degree possible without losing necessary information. The Bluebook recommends, for example, shortening any procedural phrases to abbreviations such as “In re” or “Ex parte”, as well as using any commonly-understood abbreviations to shorten the names of the parties, e.g. “Univ.” rather than “University”. Names of the source and the court are also generally abbreviated; in the example citation below, Federal Rules Decisionsis shortened to “F.R.D.”, and the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania is abbreviated to “W.D. Pa.” Sources and courts tend to have official abbreviations for this purpose, which are generally conspicuously provided for anyone needing to cite them.

The page number in a case citation is the page on which that case begins in the source. If you wish to reference a specific page as well as the general case, separate that page reference with a comma. For instance, if your reference is a case that begins on page 100 of your source, but you want to point specifically to a statement six pages in, the page number in your citation would be “100, 106”.

Case Name, Source page number (Court year) (additional information as needed).

United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff, 54 F.R.D. 282 (W.D. Pa. 1971) (“the plaintiff has failed to include with his complaint the required form of instructions for the United StatesMarshal for directions as to service of process”).

In the short-form citation of a case, you are free to shorten the case name to only the first party, or even an abbreviated form of that party’s title. If, however, the first party is a governmental entity, geographical unit, or other such creation, this may not be a helpful citation. (Since there are so many cases where the first party is, for example, the U.S. government, citing a case name as “United States” doesn’t narrow it down enough to be useful). In these cases, cite instead by the name of the second party.

If you are citing a specific point in the case, you may use only that page number and eliminate the page that the case begins on. If you are still citing the case as a whole, retain the page number on which the case begins.

Shortened Case Name, Source at page number.

Ex rel. Mayo, 54 F.R.D. at 282. 

Constitutions

When citing the constitution of a governmental entity, use the abbreviated title of the constitution, then specify to which subdivision of said document you are referring. Some helpful abbreviations for those subdivisions are as follows:

Set the title of the constitution in small caps if possible. The subdivisions should then be listed, separated by commas, in order of decreasing size.

Constitition Title subdivision, subdivision.

Tenn. Const. art. IX, §3.

If you are citing a section of that constitution which has since been amended or repealed, note the date of that fact in parentheses at the end of the citation, e.g.

U.S. Const. amend. XVIII (repealed 1933).

If the entire constitution is no longer in effect, add the date at which the constitution was originally adopted to the citation as follows:

Md. Const. of 1864, art. XXIV.

If the section of a defunct constitution you are citing was adopted in a different year than the constitution as a whole, then include that year as well, e.g.

Ala. Const. of 1819, amend. III (1850).

There is no short form for constitutional citations.

Statutes, Laws, and Codes

To cite a federal statute, you need to include:

• The title of the act
• The source in which it is found
• The year in which it was enacted (session laws) OR the year in which the source was published (codes).
• The chapters or section(s) being referred to.

State statutes follow a similar structure, but whenever possible, one should simply cite the appropriate section of the code.

Act Title, Source § number (year).

The Guano Islands Act, 48 U.S.C. ch. 8 §§1411-12 (2012).

Ga. Code Ann. § 39-2-17 (2016).

As with constitutional citations above, if the statute has been repealed or amended, indicate this fact and the year it occurred in parentheses at the end of the citation. You may also include additional information in the same fashion.

Utah Crim. Code § 76-7-104 (1973) (repealed 2019).

Short form citations for statutes need to include the section number as well as the minimum information necessary to identify which of your previously-cited authorities the citation refers to. An appropriate short form for the Guano Islands Act above, for instance, could be:

48 U.S.C. §§1411-12

Bills and Resolutions

To cite a bill or resolution, include:

• Title of bill if needed
• Document number
• Term and session of the legislative body
• Relevant sections
• Year published

For bills passed in state legislative bodies rather than federal, you should also include the state.

Act Title, Document Number, Term # Legislative Body, Session § number (State year).

Student Protection Act, H.R. 2625, 113^th Cong. § 3 (2013).

Floor Amendment 1 to S.B. 459. 42^nd Leg., 1^st Sess. § 2 (N.M. 1995).

In short-form citations, it is sufficient to cite by document number, though to avoid confusion, one should specify the state unless discussing a federal law.

Ga. H.B. 677

Hearings

When citing a hearing, include:

• The full title as published
• The relevant bills, if any
• The committee
• The term & session of the legislative body
• The year of publication
• The name and titles of the individual providing a statement
• Relevant page numbers

Title: Hearing on Bill Before the Committee, Term & Session page numbers (year) (statement of Firstname Lastname, Titles).

Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations for 2003: Hearing before the H. Subcomm. on Education Appropriations, 107^th Cong. (2002) (statement of Elmo Monster, Sesame Street Muppet).

Protecting America’s Harvest: Hearing on H.R. 2414 Before the H. Subcomm. on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, 111^th Cong. (2010) (statement of Stephen Colbert, Host, The Colbert Report, Comedy Central Studios)

Note: No method of writing short-form citations for hearings is listed in the Bluebook.

Information pulled from: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/bluebook_citation_for_legal_materials.html

Miscellaneous Sources

This page covers types of media you may want to cite that don’t properly fit into any of the previous pages. If you are attempting to cite a source that you can find neither on this page nor any of the others in the Chicago section, consult the CMOS or model your citation on the example that most closely resembles your source.

LECTURES

This entry covers the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines for citing lectures, papers presented at meetings or poster sessions, and other similar presentations. Such entries often include the sponsorship, location, and date of the meeting following the title. When such texts are published, they should be treated like a chapter in a book or article in a journal. If the material is available online, include a URL at the end of your citation. The model is as follows:

N:

1. Firstname Lastname, “Title of Lecture” (medium, sponsorship, location, date).

B:

Lastname, Firstname. “Title of Lecture.” Medium at sponsorship, location, date.

Note that not all lectures have titles – if you are, for instance, citing a lecture given by a professor to his class, there may be no title to provide. In this case, feel free to skip that portion of the citation.

N:

2. Paul Hanstedt, “This is Your Brain on Writing: The Implications of James Zull’s The Art of Changing the Brain for the Writing Classroom” (presentation, Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Francisco, CA, March 12, 2009).

B:

Hanstedt, Paul. “This is Your Brain on Writing: The Implications of James Zull’s The Art of Changing the Brain for the Writing Classroom.” Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Francisco, CA, March 2009.

VISUAL ARTS

This entry can be applied to paintings, sculptures, and all forms of visual art. (Music and other performing arts are covered under LINK:“Audiovisual Recordings and Other Multimedia.”) As usual, these must be cited with title, creator, and date as available, but the nature of these sources requires that you also provide medium, dimensions, and physical location, as follows:

N:

3. Firstname Lastname, Title, date, medium, height × width × depth (unit conversion), location.

B:

Lastname, Firstname. Title. Date. Medium, height × width × depth (unit conversion). Location.

There is some flexibility in portions of this citation. “Date” can be as simple as the year the piece of art was completed; it can be specific enough to include a season, month, or even a day. There might also be complications to acknowledge. In analog photography, for example, the date the photo was taken and the day it was developed into the print you are referencing are probably different; you might acknowledge that with something like “Spring 2013, printed 2018.” You may also have to give a date range if the specific year is unknown. “Location” might be a museum where it is on display, a private collection, or a publication in which it is reproduced; though, if possible, you should always cite the original rather than a reproduction.

You may find “Dimensions” unfamiliar, but most museums and the like will provide you with the medium and dimensions as part of the display or their website; these are standard attributes by which artwork is catalogued. Note that, when dealing with two-dimensional pieces such as paintings or photographs, you will use only height and width; “height” refers to the vertical dimension when the painting is hung on the wall in its correct orientation. Three-dimensional pieces will also include “depth.” Note that it is encouraged to provide dimensions in both imperial and metric units – use whichever the displaying institution gives, then follow it with a conversion in parentheses.

If images of the piece are available online, you should provide a URL at the end of your citation. 

N:

4. Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer, 1808–10, oil on canvas, 110 cm × 171.5 cm (43 in × 67.5 in), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/KwEv_TMiJhn5kA.

5. The Swimming Reindeer, 11th millennium BCE, mammoth ivory, 20.7 cm × 3 cm × 2.7 cm (8.1 in × 1.2 in × 1.1 in), British Museum, London, England. 

6. Ivan Frederick, The Hooded Man, 2003, photograph, The Economist, cover, May 8, 2004.

B:

Friedrich, Caspar David. Der Mönch am Meer. 1808-10. Oil on canvas, 110 cm × 171.5 cm (43 in × 67.5 in). Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/KwEv_TMiJhn5kA.

The Swimming Reindeer. 11th millennium BCE. Mammoth ivory, 20.7 cm × 3 cm × 2.7 cm (8.1 in × 1.2 in × 1.1 in). British Museum, London, England.

Frederick, Ivan. The Hooded Man. 2003. Photograph. The Economist, cover, May 8, 2004.

ANCIENT, SACRED, MEDIEVAL, OR CLASSIC TEXTS

Some texts have been reprinted and re-translated so often over the centuries that conventional citations are counterproductive. If, for instance, you cited page 73 of Beowulf, your reader may be unable to find that reference – there are dozens of different translations and editions out there, very few of which share pagination. Even if you specify the edition, that may frustrate readers who have other editions. However, nearly all editions of Beowulf have the same line-numbering system, so citing line 2145 will be accessible to everyone. This same concept, on a larger scale, is what we call “classical citation”.

Classical citation applies only to old, widely-circulated texts with many varied editions. In classical citation, rather than follow page number, you simply follow whatever organizational scheme the author set up, as well as a line number for poetic works. This is used only in note citations – in the bibliography, you are expected to cite the book as normal, so that all the information on your specific edition is provided. The format is extremely simple, and goes as follows:

N:

7. Author, Title, number.number.number.

It is considerate to your reader to specify the edition, translator, numbering  system, or any other relevant information in the very first note citation:

N:

8. Author, Title (Firstname Lastname’s numbering), number.number.number., trans. Firstname Lastname, ed. Firstname Lastname (City: Publisher, year).

Note that you should only include those details if they’re relevant – it is rare, for instance, that there are competing numbering systems that would require you to specify whose you are using. Often the editor is the translator, and therefore does not need to be cited twice. In all subsequent note citations, use only the brief classical citation.

The numbers by which you cite a specific passage in one of these texts vary depending on the type of text you are using. For an epic poem, you should use “book.line”; for classic plays, you should use “act.scene.line.”; for many medieval and classical texts, you should use “book.chapter.section”, if all three are provided. Some texts, like Plato’s or Aristotle’s works, have their own specialized numbering systems. Prose texts that were not divided into chapters and sections by the author are often just cited by paragraph number. Sacred texts generally use colons instead of periods and cite “chapter:verse” – however, if you are citing a sacred text from any religion you are not intimately familiar with, you should check and see what system the adherents of that religion have developed for their text, or at least follow conventions set down by authoritative scholarship.

There are a few additional quirks in classical citation. For instance, if you are citing the Bible, you must specify which version you are using in every note citation, due to the wide variation from one to another. Many classical texts and authors have official abbreviations you can use if you want to shorten your citations still further – the catalog of these abbreviations is maintained by the Oxford Classical Dictionary. If you feel it is necessary, you can also include labels such as “bk.”, “para.”, “line”, “chap.”, and so forth in the first note, in which case you would write it more like this:

N:

Author, Title, bk. number, chap. number, sec. number.

The following examples cover a range of different types of texts that commonly use classical citation.

N:

9. Gilgamesh, tablet 2, lines 111-4.

10. Matthew 10:34 (NRSV).

11. Tac., Germ., para. 40.

12. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.620.

13. Beowulf  86-9, ed. Friedrich Klaeber (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1950).

14. Qur’an 45:6.

15. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3.2.342.

REFERENCE WORKS

This entry covers publications such as dictionaries, encyclopediae, style guides, and the like. There are a few relevant differences between citing these works and a regular book; all of these differences apply to the note form, not the bibliography form, however, so we will only have examples in note format. Other than the differences noted below, you may cite reference works as you would any other publication of that medium.

First, any such work that is organized into sections will be cited by said sections, rather than by page number, like the classical works above:

N:

16. The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 14.232.

Works organized into entries, such as dictionaries, will be cited by entry. However, rather than treat them like a chapter or section in a standard book, you treat them like a page number. This is marked by the abbreviation s.v., which stands for sub verbo, ‘under the word’. If your citation refers to multiple entries, indicate this by typing s.vv. instead, then listing the entries. Note that the s.v. is placed at the very end for print sources, but for online sources, it is followed by the “last modified”date and the URL.

N:

17. Wikipedia, s.v. “Potawatomi Trail of Death,” last modified February 5, 2019, 05:02, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potawatomi_Trail_of_Death. 

Particularly well-known and reliable reference works, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, need not appear in the bibliography at all, but can be cited only in the notes. These citations only require the name of the work, the edition/year, and the entry in question:

N:

18. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed (1989), s.v. “Dalek.”

Information pulled from: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/miscellaneous.html