How to write Chicago footnotes (and shortened forms)
Chicago notes and bibliography is the style most students get half right. The tricky part is not the full footnote — it is knowing when a footnote should be shortened and what "ibid." actually means today.
The first footnote is the full reference
The first time you cite a source, the footnote carries the full bibliographic detail. It reads like a bibliography entry but with the author in normal order (first name then surname) and commas doing most of the work.
A book looks like this:
1. Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (London: Profile Books, 2015), 112.
A journal article adds the article title in quotation marks and the volume, issue and page range of the journal:
2. Sarah Jones, "Reading the Republic," Journal of Roman Studies 104, no. 2 (2014): 45.
Every later footnote is short
After the first note, Chicago shortens. You use surname, a shortened title, and the page — nothing else. This is not optional: repeating the full reference on every page is a common reason students lose marks.
3. Beard, SPQR, 118.
If two consecutive notes cite the same work, "ibid." is still permitted by some institutions but Chicago now discourages it because it breaks when you reorder or insert a note. Using the shortened form every time is safer and clearer.
Page numbers are not decoration
A footnote supports a specific claim on a specific page. If you cannot find the page, do not invent one — go back to the source. Where a source genuinely has no pagination, such as most web pages, cite the section heading or paragraph instead.
This is exactly why a tool should ask you to confirm a page rather than guess. An unverifiable page number is worse than no page number at all.
The bibliography is a different shape
Your bibliography is alphabetical by surname, uses a hanging indent, and drops the punctuation style of the footnote. The same Beard book becomes:
Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. London: Profile Books, 2015.
Footnotes and the bibliography are two views of the same source record. Keep the record accurate once and both formats follow.