Citing Edited Books in Chicago Style

Sound the celebratory trombone and strike the ritual tambourine. It’s referencing time again! And today we’re looking at how to cite edited books again. In this post, we’re going to look at Chicago referencing. There are two versions of this system:

• Author–date citations and a reference list (more common in the sciences)
• Footnotes and a bibliography (more common in humanities subjects)

As such, we’ll cover both approaches in the guide that follows.

The Basics

As with any referencing system, your client is most likely to need to cite the chapter author rather than the editor(s) of the volume as a whole when citing an edited book. The details of the container volume will then be given in the reference list or bibliography. The only time the editor should be cited is when referencing the entire volume.

If you suspect that the client has cited the editors when they should be citing the chapter author, leave a comment about this.

Author–Date Citations

With in-text citations, the chapter author should be cited just as the author would for a book with a single author. In the reference list the correct format is:

Surname, First name. Year. ‘Chapter Title’. In Book Title, edited by Editor name(s), Page range. Place of Publication: Publisher.

In practice, then, a reference would look like this:

Straub, Peter. 1992. ‘The Ghost Village’. In Metahorror, edited by Dennis Etchison, 370–77. New York: Dell Publishing.

Footnotes and Bibliography

In Chicago footnotes, the format for citing an edited book is as follows:

ⁿ Name, ‘Chapter Title’, in Book Title, ed. Editor Name(s) (Place of Publication: Publisher, Year), Page number(s).

So, for instance, the chapter above could be cited as:

¹ Peter Straub, ‘The Ghost Village’, in Metahorror, ed. Dennis Etchison (New York: Dell Publishing), 371.

The reference format in the bibliography is a little different:

Surname, First name, ‘Chapter Title’. In Book Title, edited by Editor Name, Page range. Place of Publication: Publisher, Year.

Note that it is the full page range for the chapter here, not just the specific page cited in the footnote. In practice, a reference would therefore look like this:

Straub, Peter, ‘The Ghost Village’. In Metahorror, edited by Dennis Etchison, 370–77. New York: Dell Publishing, 1992.

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