How to Cite a Journal Article in Chicago Style

The Chicago journal article format

The template for a bibliography entry is:

Author Last Name, First Name, and First Name Last Name. “Title of the Article in Headline Style.” Title of the Journal volume, no. issue (Year): firstpage–lastpage. https://doi.org/xxxx

• Authors: only the first author is inverted in the bibliography; the rest appear in normal order. Bibliographies list up to ten authors.
• Article title: headline-style capitalisation, in quotation marks.
• Journal: headline style and italic, followed directly by the volume number, then no. and the issue number, then the year in parentheses and a colon.
• Page range: the full range of the article, joined with an en dash (452–468). The specific page you cite belongs in the in-text citation.
• DOI: preferred over a URL, in the form https://doi.org/…, ending the entry.

Worked examples

Two authors, with a DOI (bibliography)
Nguyen, Thanh T., and Raj S. Patel. “The Effects of Spaced Practice on Long-Term Retention.” Journal of Educational Psychology 114, no. 3 (2022): 452–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000712

Four authors, no DOI
Okafor, Chiamaka N., Emma M. Lindqvist, Diego A. Romero, and Hana J. Kim. “Remote Learning and Student Engagement in First-Year Courses.” Studies in Higher Education 46, no. 11 (2021): 2287–2303.

One author, article number instead of pages
Brennan, Sarah K. “Feedback Timing and Revision Quality in Undergraduate Writing.” Assessing Writing 45 (2020): 100456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2020.100456

Author–date in-text citations

The matching in-text form is (Author Year, page): (Nguyen and Patel 2022, 460). Four or more authors shorten to et al.: (Okafor et al. 2021, 2290). There is no comma between the author and the year.

Common mistakes

• Inverting every author’s name — in the bibliography only the first author is inverted.
• Adding “vol.” before the volume number — Chicago gives the volume as a bare number after the journal title.
• Putting a comma between author and year in the in-text citation — author–date Chicago has none: (Nguyen and Patel 2022).
• Printing the DOI in the old doi: form or leaving a database URL in its place.

Check your reference against your institution’s guidelines — lecturers sometimes vary the style.