There are thousands of different styles. The styles used in the fields studied at the Graduate Institute fall into two main categories:
- author-date styles: in-text citations have the following form (author, date)
- note styles: citations appear in footnotes, providing abridged or full citations.
In both cases, there is also a bibliography or reference list at the end of the text, listing all the references that appear in the text in alphabetical order.
The remaining pages of this guide will introduce the Chicago Style, a style commonly used at the Graduate Institute.
Law students should use specific legal styles. Our Legal Citation guide gives the main features of 3 of them.
In all cases, students should speak with their supervisor before choosing a style.
Some computer programmes, called citation managers, allow to automate the citation process and are really useful. Training sessions to learn how to use one of these programmes, Zotero, are regularly organised at the Institute. A Zotero online guide is also available