Updated May 20, 2025

CMOS 13.13 in the Spotlight

In the old days, authors wrote out their source citations from scratch, and editors checked them to make sure they were correctly formatted. Now there are tools that will do this for you, from online “Cite” buttons to full-featured citation management apps. Most of these will apply Chicago style automatically.

This sounds good, but from an editor’s perspective it isn’t perfect. Automated source citations depend on metadata—the details that identify a book or other type of work online—and this metadata doesn’t always result in a properly styled citation. Plus, authors still need to enter some of the information manually, so there’s always the potential for typos.

Fortunately, any problems are usually easy to fix. Let’s put this to the test with a pair of sources—a book and a journal article—using sample citations that we generated automatically (more on that later).

The Jungle

Say you’re editing a Word manuscript for a new book on the history of workplace relations in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. The hypothetical author did a lot of research and, as we’ll soon discover, relied on software to create the citations and add them to the manuscript.

Book

Let’s say that one of the cited sources is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the classic 1906 novelistic exposé of working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, and that it’s cited several times. Here’s the first footnote, which cites page 43:

1. Sinclair, The Jungle, 43.

That’s a shortened citation, which is perfectly fine in Chicago style, provided the same source is listed in full in a bibliography (see also CMOS 13.32). Here’s the bibliography entry:

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906.

That’s mostly fine too, and it matches the information on the book’s original title page, as we can confirm via Google Books:

It also omits the city of publication (in this case New York), in line with the 18th edition of CMOS (see CMOS 14.30). But Chicago also recommends omitting corporate identifiers like “Inc.” and “Co.” from publishers’ names in source citations, whether these are abbreviated or spelled out (see CMOS 14.33). Here’s the edited result:

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Doubleday, Page, 1906.

Journal Article

Let’s pretend that the author of our manuscript has also cited a bunch of articles from academic journals. For example, here’s a note citing pages 226 and 227 in an article in the American Journal of Sociology that examines pay inequalities among workplaces:

3. Wilmers, Tong, and Zhang, “Between-Firm Inequality and Informal Social Relations,” 226–27.

OK, but CMOS (as of the 18th edition) recommends citing only two authors in a note; for more than two, only the first would be cited, followed by et al. (“and others”); see CMOS 13.78. And because this is a shortened citation, the title would normally be pared down to no more than four words (see CMOS 13.36). Here’s the adjusted citation:

3. Wilmers et al., “Between-Firm Inequality,” 226–27.

But wait, that page range (226–27) must be a typo. A quick check of the actual source (it’s always a good idea to do that) reveals that the article is on pages 1217–62, so most likely the author meant to cite pages 1226–27. We’ll put in a hypothetical query to our hypothetical author about that.

Now that we have a properly styled shortened citation to a journal article (except for that page range), let’s examine the bibliography entry:

Wilmers, Nathan, Di Tong, and Victoria Y. Zhang. “Between-Firm Inequality and Informal Social Relations.” American Journal of Sociology 130, no. 5 (March 1, 2025): 1217–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/734909.

Good (including the page range for the article as a whole), but that date seems fishy. Academic journals usually carry volume and issue numbers, and each issue typically corresponds to a specific month or season, depending on the journal—but usually not a specific day.

Issue no. 5 in vol. 130 of the American Journal of Sociology was published in March 2025 (not March 1, 2025), as can be confirmed from the footer on the first page of the PDF version of the cited article (among other places):

But a season or month isn’t necessary for tracking down an article when you know the volume and issue number, and the 18th edition of Chicago clarifies that this info may be omitted (see CMOS 13.26). Here’s the edited entry:

Wilmers, Nathan, Di Tong, and Victoria Y. Zhang. “Between-Firm Inequality and Informal Social Relations.” American Journal of Sociology 130, no. 5 (2025): 1217–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/734909.

Where Did These Citations Come From?

The uncorrected versions of the citations above were generated for this post using ZoteroBib, the free web-based citation tool from Zotero, an open-source reference manager maintained by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship. In real life (again, our manuscript on workplace relations is only hypothetical), an author would have copied and pasted these citations into the manuscript as needed.

ZoteroBib is great, but it doesn’t do everything. For example, a specific page number (or range) would need to be added manually by the author when copying a note to paste into the manuscript:

And a shortened version of the title would need to be created or adjusted in ZoteroBib’s editing interface (accessed via the bibliography entry):

But again, those have to be done manually, so they’re open to typos (as we saw with the page numbers in the previous section).

For what it’s worth, we pasted the URLs for the book and journal article examples above into ZoteroBib to generate our citations. That works most of the time, but some sites may block such requests. For best results, use the desktop version of Zotero, which can gather data directly as you consult each source.

“Recommended Citation Format”

Some sources list a recommended citation format with the source itself; these can be copied and pasted directly into a manuscript. Those citations aren’t always accurate, and they may not conform to the latest Chicago style.

Here’s Google’s recommended citation for The Jungle (via the Create Citation feature under “About this edition”):

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. United States: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906.

Close, but “United States” would have been wrong even if Chicago still required a place of publication, which is almost always a city—in this case New York, as we saw earlier in this post. And again, “& Company” can be omitted in Chicago style. 

Most editors would spot the problem with the place of publication right away, but it takes vigilance in a work with many citations.

How Authors Can Help

ZoteroBib and the “Cite” options at Google Books and elsewhere can save time, but they aren’t perfect. Our advice for authors, in the spirit of CMOS 13.13, would be as follows: Take advantage of the available tools, but check each citation against the actual cited source the moment you create it, making any necessary adjustments then and there. Then double-check the results again in your final manuscript.

This will mean less work down the line for both you and your copyeditor.

PostScript: AI

For the updated version of this post, we prompted the free version of ChatGPT to create a bibliography entry for the 1906 Doubleday edition of The Jungle according to the latest version of Chicago style. The results were excellent, but not quite in line with the 18th edition of CMOS:

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1906.

Assuming you’ve read this post, you should notice two departures from Chicago style. Automation saves time, but it still needs to be double-checked—and edited.

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Top image: Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois (July 1941). Photo by John Vachon. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

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