In your paper, when you quote directly from a source in the author's words, or when you paraphrase someone else’s idea, you need to tell the reader where the words and ideas comes from so the original author gets credit. When you do this within the text  the reader the author’s name and the date the source was published in the text of your paper, this is called an in-text citation.

The Chicago/Turabian citation style uses in-text citations only in its Author–Date method, which is generally used for social science papers and is explained below. If your professor asks you to cite sources with footnotes and bibliography rather than in-text citations, make sure you use the Notes and Bibliography (NB) method rather than the Author–Date method described here.

Source by a Single Author

To cite this type of reference in the text, you should use what is known as a parenthetical—citation information enclosed in parentheses—at the end of the relevant sentence. The parenthetical should include the author’s last name (with no first or middle initial) followed by the year the source was published. If you’re citing a direct quote, you also need to include the page number after a comma. For example:

• Social representations theory posits that reified scientific knowledge that exists at the boundaries of a given society will be interpreted in meaningful and often simplified forms by the majority (Pauling 2005).
• Social representations theory “proposes a new hypothesis…” (Pauling 2005, 113).

If you choose, you can integrate the author’s name into the sentence itself—this is known as a "signal phrase"—and provide just the year in parentheses:

• Pauling (2005) posits that ...

Source by Two or Three Authors

Authors should be presented in the order in which they are listed on the published article. If you include the authors’ names in the parenthetical, use the word "and" between the two names. For example:

• Social representations theory posits that reified scientific knowledge that exists at the boundaries of a given society will be interpreted in meaningful and often simplified forms by the majority (Pauling and Liu 2005).

You may still choose to use a signal phrase instead, but make sure you keep both authors in it:

• Pauling and Liu (2005) posit that ...

Source by Four or More Authors

For an article with more than four authors, the first time you cite the article in the text of your paper, you should use only the first author’s name followed by “et al.” and the year of publication. (“Et al.” is short for “et alia,” which means “and other people” in Latin—much like “etc.” is short for “et cetera,” which means “and other things” in Latin.)

• Social representations theory posits that reified scientific knowledge that exists at the boundaries of a given society will be interpreted in meaningful and often simplified forms by the majority (Pauling et al. 2005).

Using a signal phrase:

• Pauling et al. (2005) posit ...

Citing Multiple Publications by Different Authors

If you need to cite multiple publications by different authors in the same sentence, you should list the multiple sources in alphabetical order by author and use a semicolon to separate them.

• ... majority (Alford 1995; Pauling 2004; Sirkis 2003).

If within this citation you also have multiple sources by the same author, after that author’s name, separate the multiple dates of publication with a comma, and order them chronologically (earliest to latest).

• ... majority (Alford 1995; Pauling 2004, 2005; Sirkis 2003).

Citing Multiple Publications by the Same Author

If you need to cite multiple publications by the same author within a sentence, you use a comma to separate the years of publication in chronological order (oldest to most recent).

• ... majority (Pauling 2004, 2005).

Using a signal phrase:

• Pauling (2004, 2005) suggests that ...