As part of the research process, it is very valuable to see what other scholars are citing in their work to help to (1) get a scope of the scholarly conversation around a certain topic and (2) find other resources that might be useful to your research including primary sources. Therefore, it's important to be able to tell from a citation what the source is in terms of format, type, secondary vs primary, etc.

The following are the general order of the elements in Chicago Style Bibliographies:

Author. "Title of Article/Webpage." Title of Publication (book with publisher information, journal with volume and issue number, website). Date. Page Numbers.

Here are some general rules although there can several variations.

Author

The author is always going to be listed first in any given citation. If there is not an author listed, it could signal that the source is either a webpage or an item without an identified attribution. 

"Title of Article/Webpage."

If there is a title in quotations, that should automatically signal that you are not looking at a whole work, like a book, but it's likely a piece of a larger resource such as a journal, website, podcast series, YouTube channel, etc.

Title of Publication

The title of the book, journal, or website is featured in italics. This is the whole resource in which your source is located OR this is the title of the book is this stands alone without a preceding title in quotes. If it's a book, this area of the citation will also feature the publisher location and name of the publishers. For journals, this might also feature volume and issue numbers as appropriate.

Date

The date can be a strong indicator of if the source is a primary source or secondary source. If the date is around the same period of the event you are studying, there is a strong possibility that it is a primary source. On the other hand, secondary sources often have more recent dates.

Page Numbers

The presence of page numbers can quickly indicate that the item is either an article from a journal or a book chapter from an edited edition.

Other

You might also see the database where something was accessed at the end of the citation.

The most familiar you are with a certain citation style, the easier it will be to read citations.

“Citational politics are the rules, practices, beliefs, and principles by which we determine how we publicly map the genealogy of our thoughts and inspiration…[that] determine how our disciplines both value our work and evaluate us as scholars.” 

(Smith & Garrett-Scott, 2020, pg. 20)

As you go through your college career, start paying attention to whose voices you are finding and whose voices are absent. The institution of academia has historically been built to exclude certain voices and prioritize others. These barriers still exist in today's system. So continuously ask yourself whose voices are missing in your citations that would be relevant to your topic and think about how you can find them.