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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
My last post disappeared! Probably because I had a link in it. Anyway to make it quicker, in APA if you don't have an author name, your in-text citation and your reference become the title of the article/website. When doing so, you have to put the in-text citation in quotes as you're no longer talking about a person. And if it's a website you're supposed to put what paragraph, by using something link "para. 4" . But there's no way to put my in-text citation in quotes nor add para unless I convert it to static text and lose all the benefits of this new system.
My reference for this information is from the apastyle org web site, here's what they say:
How do you cite website material that has no author, no year, and no page numbers?
Because the material does not include page numbers, you can include any of the following in the text to cite the quotation (from pp. 170–171 of the Publication Manual):
A paragraph number, if provided; alternatively, you could count paragraphs down from the beginning of the document.An overarching heading plus a paragraph number within that section.A short title in quotation marks, in cases in which the heading is too unwieldy to cite in full.
Because there is no date and no author, your text citation would include the title (or short title) "n.d." for no date, and paragraph number (e.g., "Heuristic," n.d., para. 1). The entry in the reference list might look something like this:
Heuristic. (n.d.). In Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (11th ed.). Retrieved from URLhere
I use Chicago 15 (notes and bibliography) for my work - Word uses inline citations instead. Is there a way for me to insert properly formatted footnotes, or will I need to use RefWorks?
@jb0nez: Thank you for all of your detailed explanations. It makes it so much easier to understand what you're trying to accomplish. I was able to reproduce the same behavior that you're describing. I'm going to email the Word product team to see if they can explain the behavior. I'll let you know when I hear back from them.
@jb0nez: I heard back from the Word team. They are aware that "References" is not one of the choices, and a bug has been filed to fix this in the future. Also, a but was filed about the "n.d." not appearing. Thank you for driving awareness of these bugs. Knowing that customers are using the bibliography feature and find value in its use helps the team prove the value of the feature and the priority of the bug fixes. Thanks for your support!
As for citing website material that has no author, you can do this in the Edit Citation dialog box. Click the citation, click Edit Citation, and then under the Suppress section uncheck the Author checkbox.
And to address your very last comment, unfortunately the bibliography feature doesn't currently support non-page granularity. For paragraph numbers to appear in your citation, you'd need to convert the citation to static text and manually enter the paragraph information yourself.
@Damon: Thanks for your comment. You're correct. Unfortunately, the Word bibliography feature doesn't currently support footnote-style citations. You'll need to use a 3rd party solution instead, as you've mentioned.
so please someone tell me where do i go to get this bug? I REALLY want it! it is the correct way to cite sources in Turabian/Chicago for the footnotes!!! Word has this great feature to keep track of references but we must manually retype everything in for the footnotes. I have over 30 sources for my paper. thats HUNDREDS of footnotes and a BUG does it correctly!
Please somebody help!!!
Hi, this bibliography feature has changed my life, thank you for a simple and elegant solution to a big problem. Two problems. 1. using APA 5 and APa 6 the author's initials are being put in the in text citation. This is a big headache, because I have to convert everything to text in my final document and correct it. 2. With multiple authors, I cannot edit the citation to say "et al" and have to resort to static text again.
Is there a way to use the citation feature in ONENOTE? I use onenote extensively to collate papers, and it would be very useful to link it to the citation manager master list.
Please help
Thanks for leaving your comment, Anonymous. I've got some good and bad news. I checked in with the Word team for answers. The two problems you're encountering are actually known issues that the Word team is working on. Good news: They're working on a fix. Bad news: Unfortunately, that means I can't offer you a solution right now.
As for Onenote, there is currently no way for using citations in OneNote. I sent your feature request to the OneNote team. I can't make any promises, but at least we're giving your voice an opportunity to be heard. Thanks again for taking the time to leave your comment.
Love the bibliography feature but I'm having trouble entering book reviews and newspaper editorials as required under MLA. Can you help?
test
Hi, oddly this page won't let me comment as myself, just as anonymous, even though I am logged in. Anyway here's my question:
I'm using MS Word 2007. I have a 90,000 word book manuscript with bibliography and endnotes and I have 2 problems:
1. updating the bibliography takes ages and often it hangs so I have to restart
2. I created the bibiography in MLA 6th Edition but now I want to switch it to Chicago 7th Edition - however when I try to do that, it immediately reverts to MLA and then updates itself which means it hangs again.
How can I stop it from hanging, and switch the style to Chicago?
(Btw I tested on another document, and Chicago is definitely installed)
thanks
Sue
I am using Chicago referencing and notice that the year appears at the end of the citation. Please refer below.
Kotler, Philip. Marketing Management. USA: Prentice Hall, 2010.
But my university has taught me that the year should appear after the author's name. Is there anyway to change this in MSWord?
My last post disappeared. I am using Chicago referencing in MSWord. The position of the year appears to be wrong. It appears at the end of the reference citation in bibliography. This is how it looks like in MSWord :
But my university has taught me the year should appear after the author's name. Is there anyway I can correct this when using MSWord? Many thanks.
Thanks for this post! This has really helped me! I had discovered the citation feature on my own, but was frustrated with its use until your posting showed me the "Manage Sources" menu and "Style" dropdown. This feature is so useful! Now we can focus on our paper's content instead of agonizing over the formatting of each Bibliography Entry. We are also free to use many more sources since they are automated. In the old days, there was significant incentive to use fewer sources to reduce the considerable bibliography complexity.
I'm also very glad to have an automated way to explore some of the different styles. Its also good to see some of the modern styles being supported. My favorite at this point is "ISO690 - Numerical References" Older ones unnecessarily obfuscate important source information. If you perform 2 interviews of the same person in the same year, most of the classic styles do not produce unique citations for the different interviews.
I'll post more shortly regarding subfeatures that would be beneficial to further improve this great feature.
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