Sociology (General)

Citation is how the scholarly conversation continues to grow and is an essential element of your work as Sociology students and scholars. Below are resources on some of the more commonly used citation styles in Sociology. However, it is always best to ask your professor about which citation style they would prefer for you to use for any given class. If you need help with citation styles, please visit the general citation guide using the link below.

The American Sociology Association has its own style guide for their journal, the American Sociological Review. It is closely related to the Author-Date system of Chicago-style citation.

Chicago Citation Style is used most often in historical research, although other humanities and social science disciplines sometimes use it as well. The first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style was published in 1906 by the University of Chicago Press.

Chicago style actually offers two different options for in-text citations:

1. Notes and Bibliography: Numbers within a paper correspond to footnotes (bottom of the page) or endnotes (end of the chapter or whole work). This is the more commonly used version of Chicago style, and typically this is the version people mean when they just say "Chicago."
    
2.  Author-Date: This version is similar to MLA, using parenthetical in-text citations within a paper.

In both variations of Chicago, the Bibliography at the end of the paper should include complete citations for all of the sources you referenced in a paper, and may also include sources that you consulted but did not end up paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting in the paper's text.