3 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE AUTOMATIC BIBLIOGRAPHY

Font setting, bold or italic, inserting pictures and diagrams, maybe even using page breaks in Word. Many people don't know what else it's useful for and how much time it can save, for example when writing a thesis. When writing school submissions and theses, you can make your own work easier by automating the obligatory source citation and bibliography. See what you can discover and how you can use it!

 

1. Harvard, Chicago or APA? You know them all!

With the automatic bibliography, you pay for an assignment don't have to put together your bibliography yourself at the end, you can automate it in a few simple steps as you write, and the system will keep adding to it as your sources grow. You can choose from a variety of standard styles (for social science papers, for example, APA and MLA are the most commonly used), which are predefined in the style guide. You can find them in the menu here:

Reference tab/ Style / The drop-down menu will display the types

 

2. Automatic formatting

 

Book, journal article, report, newspaper article, or online source? Where to put the full stop? Should the year be before or after the author? Should it be for online sources? Italic or bold? In the automatic bibliography, when entering the details of the citation, indicate the type of source (book, book extract, journal...) and then insert it according to the source type. The exact procedure is as follows: click at the end of the text passage you want to cite, then:

 

Reference / Insert citation / Add new source

 

In case you don't have time to fill in the source details, or you don't have it and can't do it by heart, or you plan to do the bibliography at the very end, you can add a placeholder to mark the text you want to cite, which you can return to later. Maybe you like Word after all...?

 

 

3. Do you already know in advance that you will need the source used in one chapter for the rest of your thesis? Don't worry, Word remembers your source list so you won't have to fill in the source details again later. You can simply select it from the saved source list. Like this:

Reference / Manage Sources / Search (enter the author or title here)

 

Or like this:

Reference / Insert Citation / Here it will list your sources right away, just click on it and it will insert it right after your citation

 

If you open a new document without a citation already marked, don't worry, because your previously used sources will be saved and displayed again, so you just have to move them from the Basic List to the Current List.

 

When writing a thesis or a longer document, it's worth using these practices, as they not only save time but also reduce the risk of getting something wrong with the source citation. It's worth diving into the possibilities that Word gives you, who knows what else it might know that you didn't realise.