Determine the citation style demanded by your college or university's history department. The Chicago Manual of Style is the most frequently used citation style guide among history departments and within professional history journals, but it is important to be certain which style is applicable before proceeding. Check your college or university's website where citation expectations are often posted by department, or consult any handbooks listing departmental policies on citation with which you may have been provided at the beginning of semester.
Familiarize yourself with the basic citation rules of your format, such as whether you will be expected to use superscripts and footnotes or endnotes, or parenthetical citations within the body of your essay. This can be done by consulting a copy of the style guide you are required to use, either online or through your college or university library.
Determine whether you will be using automated citation tools or manual citation methods. Automated citation tools may speed up the process of proper citation later on, but their initial learning curve and occasional software incompatibility issues may also cost time. Manual citation requires patience and an eye for detail, but one style format is easily learned and the citation process becomes quicker with practice.
Input the source's information into the proper fields if you have chosen an automatic citation tool. From there, the citation tool's help, FAQ or tutorial will demonstrate how to successfully integrate the source into your essay and bibliography. If you have chosen to cite manually, determine the key data required for the type of source you are using, locate this data in the relevant area of your book, website or journal, and enter it in the order and manner dictated by your history department's required style guide. The key data is most frequently the title of a work, who published it, who wrote it, in what year, and to which page(s) you are referring to.
Cite any information that is not commonly accepted as fact throughout the field of history. When in doubt, it is usually more advisable to cite the relevant source than to omit a citation. Remember that in addition to direct quotations, your rephrasing of a source(s) major ideas constitutes an indirect quotation and should be cited. In these cases, often a whole source may be cited rather than specific pages.