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[Author's note: Office 2010 Service Pack 1 includes updates to the Word 2010 Citations & Bibliography group. After installing the service pack you'll notice the new bibliography styles: APA 6th Edition, MLA 7th Edition, Harvard- Anglia 2008, and IEEE 2006. Screenshots in this blog post have been updated to reflect these changes. Download Office 2010 Service Pack 1 to update your computer.]
Did you know that it's easy to create a bibliography based on common citation formats in Microsoft Word? I describe how, below.
But first, let me share one student's story... the inspiration for this post.
A few months ago, we were asking students about how they write a research paper. Jon, a freshman at a local community college, had just completed a huge term paper that counted for a large percentage of his overall grade in a class. While describing how he wrote this paper, he told me he hated writing bibliographies because he couldn't remember the proper format for citing sources. Unaware that Word has a built-in solution to his problem, he had turned to an online alternative.
When I told him about the citation generator in Word he said, "Word does what? Where's that at?" Ouch.
In Microsoft Word 2007 and Word 2010, you can automatically generate a bibliography of the sources you used to write your paper. Basically, every time you add a new citation to the document, you also create a new source that will appear in the bibliography.
Since it's that time of year, again, and students are busy researching, gathering references, and writing papers, I thought I'd share this information with you. So, if you're like Jon and don't like writing bibliographies, here's how you can insert citations into Word and format bibliographies using common formats, such as MLA, APA, and Chicago-style.
To add a citation after a quote:
When you've completed these steps, the citation is added to the Insert Citation button, so the next time you quote this reference, you don't have to type it all out again.
If you want to create a bibliography from your sources, do the following:
If you want to learn more about using citation placeholders and editing sources, have a look at Creating a bibliography in Word 2010 or Creating a bibliography in Word 2007. Or if you want to export your bibliography sources to another computer, check out this post on the Microsoft Word blog.
There's one issue with the APA 5th Edition citation style I want to call out. APA style uses the author's name and publication date. If you have multiple citations from the same author, there is a known Word 2010 bug where the citation generator fills in the publication title when it's not supposed to. If this happens to you, here's how to fix the problem:
1. In the Word document, click the citation.
2. Click the down-arrow and then click Edit Citation.
3. Click the Title checkbox and then click OK.
-- Jennifer Bost
Comments: (74) Collapse
@looner: The 2009 MLA Guidelines for automatic citations references MLA Seventh Edition. Currently, Word 2010 supports MLA Sixth Edition. However, the Word product team has confirmed that a future service pack will include updates to MLA Seventh Edition and APA Sixth Edition. As soon as that service pack is released I will update this blog post.
Thanks for leaving a comment and letting me and the Word team know that you're interested in this feature and are waiting for the update.
I like the bibliography feature, but how do I make it work with footnotes? I am generally not able to use parenthetical citations, I need correctly formatted footnotes or endnotes. Is there a way to do this? If not are they working on it? BTW, I know how to insert the automatically numbered footnote/endnote, but I want it to automatically format the citation from the references stored in the reference. Insert citation only inserts a parenthetical notation regardless of the location I insert at, i.e. in the text or in the footnote/endnote area.
Thanks
I would love this feature if it could be adjusted to use the myriad of fields available without XML programming. A simple check box to manually include the information is fine.
For example, if I'm retrieving a journal article from an electronic source, I'm supposed to include additional fields such as DOI, retrieved date, etc. Some of those fields don't exist and those that do won't get inserted into the document unless they are "recommended" fields. So while I can enter all the additional information I can get fields for, I can't do anything with that extra information.
More than formatting issues, the ability to get the complete reference information exported is essential to making this a useful feature. Hopefully some of this will be addressed in a service pack. (Fingers crossed!)
@SRT-13: Thanks for stopping by the blog and leaving a comment. I really appreciate it when folks sign in and leave product suggestions. I can't make any promises about what will appear in a future service pack, but I can promise that I'll forward your suggestion to the bibliography team. After all, it never hurts to ask. Thanks, again, for your comment.
Besides the APA 6th edition, please communicate to the Word Team that we need a 3rd option for our source list titled "REFERENCES". Works Cited and Bibliography do not meet the APA format requirement. According to my professor, a Bibliography includes anything you have read or researched, even if it lacks a specific citation in your paper. But a References list can only include those items which have a citation listed within the body of your paper. This has been a problem in 2007 and 2010 and should not be overlooked when the service pack debuts.
@Musician2111: You're absolutely correct. I forwarded your request to the Word team and they have already filed a bug. (A bug is how they track their work items.) Now, I'm not making any promises that this will appear in the next service pack, mind you. There are a ton of work items already, but it's a good step. Thanks for leaving your comment; we greatly appreciate your feedback.
I have Office 2007. When I use a source with more than one author, it showes up correctly in the source manager current list, but in the preview of source manager and when I insert a blbliography, only the first author appears with an "a" (the beginning of "and") but no names of the other authors. I use APA style. How do I fix this?
@Margriet: Did you use a semi-colon between the authors names when you added the new source? For example, Kramer, James; Chen, Jackie; Mark, Paul. According to APA styles, the citation should appear as (Kramer, Chen, & Mark, <year>).
Does that fix the issue for you?
Hi Jennifer, are there any updates as far as the new service pack with updated APA 6th ed. style citations. This program has caused much confusion for my fiance and I. We love the fact that Word has this feature, but we would love it even more if it was correct. Thank you!
@shonofear: Thanks for checking in. I hear ya' loud and clear. Believe me, I've got my eyes peeled for the SP1 release date, too. There's no official announcement, yet. But as soon as it's out, I'll definitely blog about the bibliography updates. Please keep checking in... it's coming!
Is there a way to automatically combine citations so that (Smith, 2007) (Jones, 1009) (Wilson, 2005) show up as (Smith, 2007; Jones, 2009; Wilson, 2005)?
Also, a way to cite US statutes would be nice.
Vancouver is one of the most used styles, is there a possibility of adding that to the Microsoft bibliography option?
On May 22, fbrusca wrote:
"Is there a way to automatically combine citations so that (Smith, 2007) (Jones, 1009) (Wilson, 2005) show up as (Smith, 2007; Jones, 2009; Wilson, 2005)?"
Oh, I am begging you to please, please, PLEASE share with me the fix for this formatting problem! I am writing a dissertation and LOVE being able to keep track of the works cited, as well as maintaining an enormous master reference list, but multiple citations must be separated by semi-colons in APA and this is making my committee nuts.
Can you help??
Never mind! I found the solution to my formatting problem while doing multiple in-text citations by various authors:
1. Insert the first citation.
2. Hover the cursor over the first citation and click "insert citation tab." Wait for the new citation to be inserted behind the first citation, now separated by a semi-colon as required by APA.
3. Repeat insertions in the the first citation as necessary.
I can't believe I didn't think to try this. It works very well if you are careful to begin with the citation you want to show first (e.g. by publication date). Happy, happy day!!
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