- Step 1: Select the Citation Style
- Step 2: Enter the Sources
- Step 3: Insert In-Text Citations
- Step 4: Generate the Bibliography
- Conclusion
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Step 4: Generate the Bibliography
At the end of your paper, you will need some sort of list of your sources. This can be called a bibliography, a works cited list, or a reference list.
Technically those terms are not all identical. A bibliography is a list of all the sources you referred to as you prepared your paper, whether or not they are directly cited in the paper. Works Cited and References both are the same thing: a list of sources that are directly cited. The difference in name depends on the citation style; MLA uses Works Cited, while APA uses References. However, Microsoft Word does not make a functional distinction between them. Word includes all sources from the source database, regardless of whether they are directly cited.
To insert one of these pages (which I’ll generically call a bibliography here), do the following:
- Position the insertion point at the end of the document. Start a new page (Ctrl+Enter).
- On the References tab, click Bibliography, and then click one of the three built-in styles: Bibliography, References, or Works Cited. See Figure 4.
- Click inside the bibliography to move the insertion point there. A box appears around the bibliography and an Update Citations and Bibliography icon appears at the top. See Figure 5.
- Click the Update Citations and Bibliography button. The bibliography is re-generated.
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Figure 4: Insert a bibliography.
The bibliography is formatted in accordance with the citation style you chose earlier. If you change to a different citation style, the bibliography automatically changes too, as do the in-text citations. You don’t have to re-generate the bibliography manually.
On the other hand, if you add or remove citations and sources, you will need to re-generate the bibliography to make sure it contains the full list of sources. Follow these steps:
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Figure 5: Update a bibliography
A couple of other options:
- To change to a Works Cited or References page, click the Bibliographies button (the graphical button just to the left of the Update Citations and Bibliography button in Figure 5). Then click the desired style from the gallery that appears.
- To convert the bibliography to regular text, so you can edit it manually, click the Bibliographies button and then click Convert Bibliography to Static Text. See Figure 6.
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Figure 6: Use the Bibliographies button’s menu to choose a different style or to convert to static text.