Footnote

A numbered note at the bottom of a page that gives a source or adds a comment. Chicago's notes and bibliography system uses footnotes.

A footnote is a note placed at the bottom of the page. A small number in your text points to it. In Chicago’s notes and bibliography system, each footnote gives the source of the idea or quotation, and a bibliography at the end lists the sources in full.

1. Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (Pantheon Books, 2020), 45.

Numbering. Notes form one continuous list through your paper. Don’t restart the numbers on each page, and don’t reuse a number for a repeated citation. Give each new citation the next number.

Repeat citations. The current edition of Chicago recommends a short note for a source you have already cited, with the author’s surname, a shortened title and the page. It discourages “ibid.” See ibid.

Footnote or endnote? They hold the same content. A footnote is at the foot of the page, which is quick for a reader but uses space on the page. See endnote.

PaperCitation’s Chicago generator writes the author-date system, not footnotes, so it doesn’t produce note text.