Chicago author-date format for a 4-source economics paper with a tight deadline?

Don’t panic about that tight deadline—you have plenty of time to get this right, and formatting Chicago author-date is much simpler than it looks once you get the basic pattern down! To hit your required four sources, you can easily find one more recent economic report, news article, or working paper to support a point you have already written. For the formatting itself, Chicago author-date relies on two matching pieces: short in-text citations inside parenthetical marks and a full References list at the end. In the text of your paper, whenever you reference an idea, you just put the author's last name, the year of publication, and the specific page number right before the period, like this: (Smith 2020, 45). It is completely normal to feel stressed when a professor leaves you with vague guidelines, especially when your TA is emphasizing consistency. Think of your citations like a game of matching socks; as long as the short name and year in your text match the top of the entry on your reference page, you are in great shape. On your final References page, list your sources alphabetically by the author's last name. A standard book entry starts with the author's name, followed by the year, the title in italics, and the publisher. For a journal article, put the year after the author, place the article title in quotation marks, and italicize the journal name along with its volume number. Just take a deep breath, pick one entry style for each type of source you have, and apply that exact same structure across all four references. As long as every parenthetical note in your paragraphs links to a full entry on your final page, your paper will be clear, consistent, and ready to hand in on time.