Citations and Bibliographies in Word 2007/2010

Students don’t realize how easy they have it these days…

Remember typing out a bibliography on a typewriter, only to make a mistake at the bottom of the page and have to type the whole darn thing over?  Or having to type the bibliography over because your professor required the Chicago style sheet and you used MLA?  No more.

Word 2007 includes a new bibliography feature that makes it easier than ever to manage sources and create a bibliography, according to the style rules you select.

As you conduct research, you can add each source to a master list of sources.  For each source, you’ll fill in the title, author, publication date, etc.  When you write the paper and quote one of your sources, you can insert a citation simply by selecting one of the sources from your list.  When you’re ready to create your bibliography, Word will create it automatically from the sources you entered.

When you add sources to your document, Word saves all the data as XML.  This makes it easier to share sources with other users and to reconfigure citations and bibliographies for different documentation styles.

In the Citations and Bibliography grouping on the References tab of the ribbon, you can select a documentation style that you want to use for your bibliography.  Word will then format all of the references in your document using this style.

At any time, you can change the documentation style, and your citations and bibliography will automatically be updated to reflect the new style.

Reusing Existing Sources

After you create a source, Word stores it in two places—your Master List and your Current List.   The Master List contains all the sources you’ve ever created.  The Current List contains all the sources that will be used in the current document.

The purpose of the Master List is to save you from having to re-enter the data from a source you have used in another document.  You can copy any source from the Master List to the Current List for use in the active document.

Sharing Sources

Word 2007 also makes it easy to share sources with others.  When you create a Master List, Word stores it in a file named sources.xml, which can be found in the following locations, depending on your operating system:

Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Bibliography

Windows Vista/Windows 7

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Bibliography

If you want to share sources with someone else, you can store the sources.xml file in a shared location on your network, or you can exchange Master Lists via e-mail.  In some cases, university departments may host an entire collection in one shared location.

Works Cited vs. Works Consulted

Be sure you understand the distinction between bibliographies that are “works cited” instead of “works consulted” lists. Works cited lists contain only the sources actually cited in the document. Works consulted lists contain all sources that were used to help the author formulate his/her ideas, whether or not the sources were actually cited by the author in the document.

By default, Word creates “works consulted” lists.  That is, every item in your Current List will be included in your bibliography.  However, it’s easy to create a “works cited” list through the Source Manager.