A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

If you are in college and need to write a ton of papers. This is a really good book to have.

I used this for my M.A. thesis, and otherwise. It is a classic reference. It has all it needs to.

This book offers nothing new and is not very helpful. It's pretty much a waste of money.

This newest edition is clearly an upgrade. It addresses citation of electronic (ebooks, full-text online journal articles, etc) and straight Internet sources more comprehensively than the previous edition (which simply identified everything as either CD-ROM or an online source).

Now divided into three major sections--Research and Writing: From Planning to Production; Source Citation; Style--the layout is more user-friendly.

Particularly helpful is the addition of major section one on the research process itself from beginning to end.

Thus, this is two resources in one.

Turabian is still the must-have reference source for scholarly writing outside of the legal field. (For legal scholarship, the 18th edition of Harvard's The Bluebook is Turabian's counterpart.)