References in bookmarks

Yes, by default, unnumbered (or starred) sections do not show up in the bookmarks. And, as you noted, References are unnumbered. Use it as follows:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[bookmarks]{hyperref}% http://ctan.org/pkg/hyperref
\begin{document}
\begin{thebibliography}{1}
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{\refname}% Add references to ToC (and bookmarks)
\bibitem{someitem}
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}

According to "Tame the BeaST - The B to X of BibTEX" page 4 footnote 3:

In order to cleanly insert the bibliography in your table of contents, use the tocbibind.sty package. Other methods you can think of will probably lead to wrong page numbers.

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Following practice seems to work again with the help of \phantomsection.

SDrolet's solution to show Bibliography of Reference on content page might also work here, though we are using biblatex and/or biblatex-chicago package as well as hyperref and/or bookmark...

Use the following in your premeable.

\usepackage{biblatex-chicago}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

You might want to replace \jobname with your .bib file name, if it is different from your main .tex file.

Then add the following before \end{document}.

\phantomsection
\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc]

This is the first solution I have seen without additional package(s) or potential issues with table of content, i.e. the simplest or cleanest solution to show Reference as a top-level section in corresponding pdf bookmark. [Now seems to work fine again...]