Chicago vs Turabian Referencing Explained

A dissertation guide that requires 'Turabian format' and a journal that requires 'Chicago style' can accept, for the citation itself, exactly the same footnote. That's not a coincidence, and it isn't one style copying another. Turabian is Chicago, repackaged for a different reader.

The difference between Turabian and Chicago style is less about the citation rules themselves and more about who each book is written for. The Chicago Manual of Style is written for publishers, editors and authors preparing a manuscript for print. Turabian, written by Kate Turabian and published by the same press, strips out the publishing-industry material nobody submitting a class paper needs, and adds formatting guidance for exactly that: class papers, theses and dissertations.

This piece covers what Turabian actually removes and adds relative to Chicago, both manuals' current editions, and Chicago's own two citation systems, since knowing which system your field uses matters more than knowing which book's cover to buy.

Turabian Is Chicago, Adapted for Students

Kate Turabian first adapted Chicago's rules for graduate students at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. It's remained a University of Chicago Press publication ever since, and has been revised to keep pace with Chicago's own numbered editions. The relationship is described directly in Chicago's own citation guide, which notes that Turabian's citation systems 'are also sometimes referred to as Chicago-style citations, because they're the same as the ones presented in The Chicago Manual of Style.'

Chicago's own FAQ draws the line precisely: the manual itself exists to prepare a manuscript for publication, while Turabian exists to explain how to prepare a class paper, thesis or dissertation in the same style. The manual skips student-paper formatting entirely; Turabian is where that guidance actually lives.

Some graduate schools require 'Turabian' by name specifically because Chicago's own manual is silent on margins, title pages and chapter formatting, details a thesis office actually enforces. A department that instead says 'Chicago' for a doctoral dissertation is usually pointing at Turabian's own added chapters without using its name, since the underlying formatting requirement is the same either way.

The Difference Between Turabian and Chicago Style: What's Removed and Added

What Turabian removes is everything built for a publisher's production process: guidance on preparing a manuscript for typesetting, negotiating permissions, and the copyediting mechanics an acquiring editor handles. A student submitting a thesis chapter has no use for any of it, and Turabian simply leaves it out.

What Turabian adds instead is formatting guidance for the actual document a student turns in: title page layout, margins and spacing a graduate school specifies, a table of contents, and how all of that interacts with whichever citation system, notes or author-date, the paper is using. None of this appears in Chicago's own manual, because a published book doesn't need a title page formatted to a university's submission rules. A thesis office checking margins or a table of contents is checking Turabian's chapters, not Chicago's, even when everyone in the room calls it 'Chicago formatting' out of habit.

Two Manuals, Two Sets of Editions, and Where They Actually Stand

Both manuals carry their own edition number, and both have moved recently enough that content written even a couple of years ago may already be naming the wrong one.

Manual	Current edition	Published	Notes
The Chicago Manual of Style	18th edition	2024	Publisher describes it as the most extensive revision in a generation
Turabian	10th edition	date not shown on the publisher's own listing	Succeeds the 9th edition (2018), which paired with Chicago's 17th

Turabian has followed this pattern for decades: a new edition arrives to match whichever Chicago edition it is built on. The ninth edition, published in 2018, matched Chicago's seventeenth. The tenth follows the same logic against Chicago's eighteenth, though the publisher's own listing does not carry an exact publication date the way the 2018 edition's own announcement did. That gap matters in practice: a style guide or blog post written even two years ago may already be describing an edition your own department has since moved past.

Chicago's Two Systems, and Which One Turabian Uses

Turabian mimics both of Chicago's systems rather than one. Notes-Bibliography, Chicago's oldest and most flexible system, marks a source with a numbered footnote or endnote. Author-Date, which looks a lot like APA, marks a source with a name and year instead. A history dissertation on nineteenth-century trade policy and a psychology dissertation on memory recall would follow different Turabian chapters for exactly this reason, even though both call themselves Turabian on the title page. Chicago has two different citation systems.

A syllabus that says 'Turabian' without naming a system is really asking you to check once more. Turabian's own chapters track Chicago's two systems directly rather than inventing a third, so the same discipline pattern that decides Chicago also decides Turabian: notes for a history thesis, author-date for a social-science one. TextPulse's guide to how referencing styles split into notes, author-date and numbered families covers the wider picture beyond Chicago's own two.

Using Chicago or Turabian: What Actually Changes on the Page

For a footnote or endnote in either manual, the first citation of a source runs in full: author, title, publication details, page number. Every repeat citation of the same source shortens to the author's surname, a short title and the page, which is the detail most first-time users of the notes system forget to apply. A Chicago citation generator that builds the full note and its shortened repeat form automatically handles exactly this distinction, which is worth using even once you're confident on the rest.

A first footnote might read: Jane Smith, 'The Structure of Argument,' Journal of Rhetoric 12, no. 3 (2020): 45. The second citation of that same source shortens to: Smith, 'Structure of Argument,' 47. Both manuals apply exactly this shortening rule; only the surrounding document differs.

Author-date entries shorten differently. A source cited as (Smith, 2020) in the text stays exactly that on every repeat, since the compression happens in the reference list rather than in the in-text mark. Notes are the system that needs a second, shorter form. Author-date never does.

The practical difference most students actually meet is less about the reference format and more about the surrounding document. A Turabian paper formats like a submission built for grading: a title page laid out to a graduate school's own specification, chapter headers, and front matter such as a table of contents that a journal manuscript never needs. Chicago's own manual assumes none of that, because it was never written for a student submission in the first place.

The medical equivalent of this pairing, AMA against Vancouver, is covered separately. For the style most departments default to, the APA reference list rules are set out in full.

Whichever manual your course actually names, Chicago or Turabian, the citation itself resolves to the same underlying rule once the system is clear. TextPulse's citation generator covers both, formatting a note or an author-date entry correctly from the same source details you'd otherwise look up by hand, whether that's a first citation, a shortened repeat, or a full bibliography entry.