Hi Shanice,

With in-text citations, a page number should be included when you quote or paraphrase a specific part of a source. If you’re just referring to the source as a whole, a page number isn’t needed, but otherwise there should be a page number, yes. I advise you to add these where relevant.

In terms of your reference list entries, there are a couple of problems. First, make sure to use italics for the titles of a book and the name of a journal; I assume you probably did this but just lost that formatting in your comment here, but just in case!

Second, author’s first names should be given in the form in which they appear in the source—usually as full names rather than initials. They can appear as initials if that’s how they’re listed in the source, of course, but I assume that wasn’t the case for every author here.

Third, there seems to be an error in the book citation—”edited by 4th” doesn’t make sense. It may be that you meant “4th ed.” (4th edition) here, but filled the information in in the wrong field?

Fourth, also in the book citation, the part at the end should be “New York: New York Academic Press.” It should also end with a period, as all reference list entries do.

Finally, when a source has more than 10 authors, it’s recommended to only list the first seven, followed by “et al.”, in your reference list. So e.g., “Abarenkov, K., R. Henrik Nilsson, K. H. Larsson, I. J. Alexander, U. Eberhardt, S. Erland, K. Høiland, et al. 2010.”

I am currently using the Chicago17th edition (author-date) style for my thesis, however, my in-text citations are slightly different from yours. I used endnote as my reference manager and my in-text citations are written as the author and date (Mason 1995) but I see that you have the page number in your in-text citations as well. Do I have to add the page number to my in-text citations?

Also, I wanted to know if the following book and journal reference is following the correct Chicago 17th edition style:

Agrios, G. N. 1997. Introduction to Plant Pathology. edited by 4th. New York Academic Press New York

Abarenkov, K., R. Henrik Nilsson, K. H. Larsson, I. J. Alexander, U. Eberhardt, S. Erland, K. Høiland, R. Kjøller, E. Larsson, T. Pennanen, R. Sen, A. F. Taylor, L. Tedersoo, B. M. Ursing, T. Vrålstad, K. Liimatainen, U. Peintner, and U. Kõljalg. 2010. “The UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi–recent updates and future perspectives.” New Phytologist 186 (2): 281-5.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03160.x.

Thank you for your assistance in advance.

Best regards,
Shanice Mason