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Research Guides

Citing Sources

This guide offers resources to help you document the sources you're citing in your research papers and projects.

Turabian Style Overview

The Turabian citation style is typically used by scholars within the fields Humanities and Social Sciences, particularly in disciplines of Classics, Fine Arts, History, Philosophy, Politics and Theology. Turabian is "Chicago Style" for students.

How to Format Your Paper

Turabian Style refers to "A Manual of Style" written by Kate Turabian, and is based on the Chicago Manual of Style. However, whereas the Chicago style is designed for professional publications, Turabian style is designed for students of college-level research papers, theses, and dissertations. 

Turabian Style offers two different methods for formatting papers: Notes/Bibliography and Author/Date.

  • The Notes/Bibliography or NB format is most often used within the Humanities disciplines. This system uses numbers in the text that correspond to numbered footnotes or endnotes. Sources cited in the notes are also listed together in a separate bibliography at the end of the work.
  • The Author/Date or AD format is most often used within the Social Sciences disciplines. Instead of note numbers and notes, this system uses parenthetical references in the text that correspond directly to a list of sources at the end of the work.

Be sure to check with your course instructor, and pick one style to use consistently throughout your paper. If your professor mentions using Footnotes, they are referring the Notes/Bibliography format.

 

General Paper Format Guidelines

  • Use 12-pt Times New Roman or 11-pt Calabri (or Aptos) font.
  • 1 inch margins on all sides of the paper.
  • All text is double spaced with two exceptions:
    • block quotations of 4 or more lines, table titles and figure captions, and lists in appendixes are single-spaced.
    • table of contents, any list of figures, tables, or abbreviations, footnotes or endnotes, and bibliographies or references should be single spaced with a blank line between each item.
  • Most of the time you will only have a title page followed by numerous pages of text, ending with a Bibliography or References page. In this case, do not number the title page. Begin with page 1 on the first page of text. Page numbers must be placed in the same location on each page, header center or flush-right, or footer center or flush-left.
  • Titles should appear in Bold and centered on the page and in a font size larger than the text.
  • Headers and Subheaders should be formatted to be visibly prominent using font-size, location (left-flushed or centered) and bold or italic type. You may choose what the formatting structure is, however, you must remain consistent.