Chicago 18 (Author-Date) Video Citation Generator

Citing a video (online streaming video (YouTube, Vimeo, or TED Talk)) under the Chicago Manual of Style (Author-Date System) framework requires combining Chicago Manual of Style (author-date)'s punctuation hierarchy with the specific metadata of the source. To construct a compliant entry, researchers must collect the person or channel that uploaded the video, exact upload date (Year, Month Day), italicized video title, [Video] bracketed label, platform name, and URL. In the body of your paper, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) utilizes parenthetical author-year citations with no comma between the author and year, e.g., (Author Year, page), which links directly to an entry organized in alphabetical by author family name and chronological by publication year.

When formatting a video in Chicago Manual of Style (author-date), pay close attention to contributor names and capitalization. Specifically, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) enforces inverting only the first author name (Last, First) while writing subsequent co-authors in normal order (First Last) connected by the word "and", and applies headline-style Title Case for all titles, placing analytical works in quotation marks and standalone containers in italics. Chicago Author-Date places the year immediately after the author without parentheses in the reference list, and spells out first names rather than reducing them to initials. Furthermore, if your video does not display an individual creator, the rule is straightforward: use the official channel name or username as the author if the real name of the creator is not displayed on the channel.

For digital and online video references, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) stipulates placing the DOI (https://doi.org/...) or stable URL at the very end of the entry, requiring an access date only when no publication date exists. When citing a TED Talk watched on YouTube, cite the uploader as TED; when watched on TED.com, credit the speaker themselves as the primary author. Using the client-side Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) Video generator below, you can automatically parse URLs, DOIs, or ISBNs and apply these exact Citation Style Language (CSL) rules locally in your browser with zero server tracking.