How to reformat your references to Chicago (author-date) in Word

The slow way — and why it hurts

Reformatting a bibliography by hand means rewriting every entry: re-ordering authors, fixing capitalization, moving the year, adding or stripping DOIs, and renumbering in-text markers. For a thesis with 50–100 references that's hours of fiddly work, and a single inconsistency is exactly what a supervisor or journal copy-editor flags. The work also has to be redone from scratch the moment you target a different journal.

The fast way — 3 steps

1. 1

   Upload your .docx

   Upload the Word file that already contains your citations as footnotes or endnotes. DEEPNOTIS extracts every reference automatically.

2. 2

   Pick Chicago (author-date)

   Choose Chicago (author-date) from 2,800+ styles. Every reference re-renders from the official CSL definition for Chicago (author-date).

3. 3

   Export your reformatted document

   Download a .docx with every footnote and reference formatted in Chicago (author-date). Need another style later? Switch and re-export — the work is already done.

What changes when you switch to Chicago (author-date)

Chicago (author-date) sets specific rules for author names, capitalization (sentence vs title case), ordering, and how identifiers like DOIs appear. Applying those rules consistently across a whole bibliography is where manual reformatting breaks down — and where re-rendering from one source of truth wins.

Official source