How to manage efficiently your citations and bibliography in Microsoft Word
Are you writing a long document in Microsoft Word and filling in your bibliography manually? Well, it turns out that there is a simpler way.
Three steps it's all it takes
Managing the bibliography manually is not that big of a deal when few sources are involved and, in general, when the document one is writing is somehow brief. However, letting Word do the job for you definitely constitutes an improvement as soon as things grow in size. Before getting to the three easy steps to use the built-in Citations & Bibliography function, I want to mention its main advantages compared to the manual way:
- Automatic alphabetical order in the bibliography
- Consistency of the citations throughout the work
- Possibility to reuse citations across documents
- Automatic internal hyperlinks connecting the citations in the text to the bibliography
- Overall faster and probably more precise
Step 1: Insert your source in the source list
The first thing one needs to do is providing Word with the citations it needs to work with. To do this, first go to the "References" tab:
After that, in the "Citations & Bibliography" group, you need to choose the reference style you want to use (1), to my experience APA is the most common in the academic environment. Then, go on"Manage Sources" (2) and use "New" to add a new citation source (3).
To do this, choose first the type of source (4), fill in the information (5) and edit the reference tag (6). This is a string which uniquely identifies a given citation source. If you decide to edit the default one, I suggest using a consistent scheme, for example, I use "surname+year".
Once you click "Ok", you can see the preview both of the citation and of the complete reference (7) and your source will appear by default both in the master and in the current list. The master list includes all the references added in this way from all your documents, while the current list gathers just the ones included in the current document. The former is useful to reuse citations across documents.
Step 2: Create your first in-text citation
Most of the work is already done. To add your in-text citation, you need to place the cursor where you want it, click "Insert Citation" (1) and pick from the list the one you need (2). All the sources you added during the previous step will appear in this list. In the third picture, you can see the result.
By default, the author and the year will be shown, enclosed in round brackets. If in the current sources you have more than one work from the same author, the title will be added by default as well. You can customize this clicking on the citation itself, entering the drop-down menu from the arrow at the right and choosing "Edit citation", to pick which elements to show and which to hide.
Step 3: Add the bibliography to your file
Finally, you can add the bibliography to your file. It is enough to place the cursor when you want it, click on "Bibliography" (1) and choose the style you prefer (2). The list of the complete references for all the citations included in your text during step 2 will appear automatically.
When you add other citations in the text it is enough to click on the bibliography and then choose "Update Citations and Bibliography" to have the new references appear in the list, already in alphabetical order.
That's it!
Well, now you are good to go, I hope this guide was helpful!
Note: just to let you know, step 1 could be replaced by other, less direct, forms of citations import, like from an external file. Find out which is the one you prefer!