How to Create a Bibliography in Word

As I wrote last week, I’m jealous of today’s high school students who don’t have to rely on consulting books like The Student Writer to properly format citations and bibliographies. I’m also jealous that they don’t have the crazy formatting headaches that were associated with trying to insert a citation into a Word Perfect (not so perfect, it turned out) document after spending all night writing to hit a deadline like I did in college. Today’s students have a bunch of free tools that make it easy to add citations and bibliographies to their research papers. One of those free tools is built right into Microsoft Word.

In this short video I demonstrate how to insert citations and create a bibliography in Microsoft Word documents.

Applications for Education

Whenever I write blog posts or publish videos about tools like these I get emails from readers who like to point out that bibliography tools make it “too easy” or that there is some discrepancy between the tool and the latest minor update to MLA or APA. My point in getting middle school and high school students to use these tools is to help them build the habit of citing their sources. When they reach the point that they have a college professor who is a stickler for bibliography formats or they’re submitting research papers to journals then they can worry about the minutia of the bibliography standards of academic research papers.

Archives