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If you write a lot of academic papers in the social sciences (like my wife does) you’re likely going to have to manually format some references at one time or another.
The plugins for Word (mac and windows) do their job with the added bonus of suggesting citations based on the text in the document and the ability to search PubMed directly from Word.
If you’re like my wife, you’ll likely start inserting tabs and newlines all over the place, but then if you ever have to edit your references you’ll end up with a mess you’ll have to fix manually, which can be frustrating.
Seeing as I’m usually the dogs-body who ends up fixing APA reference formatting on an almost weekly basis, I thought I’d document it so maybe my wife will learn how (hint hint).
So here is my guide:
1) Get the basics in order.
Authors are listed Surname, Initials: “Rathbone, M.A.”. Comma separate multiple authors.
Then you put the year of the paper in parens (1994)
Then the title of the paper. Not every word is capitalized: “How to format references”
Then the journal in Italics “Harvard Educational Review”
Rathbone, M.A. (1994). How to format references. Harvard Educational Review, 33(1) 1-20.
2) Tricky line formatting stuff
APA requires that all lines other than the first be ‘hanging’, that means indenting them by 1/2 inch. And unlike the rest of your paper they should be single spaced.
Do NOT add tabs to do this, there’s a better way:
A) Select all your references by dragging over them with your mouse.
B) Navigate to Format -> Paragraph
C) In indentation, select Hanging
D) In Spacing ensure line-spacing is ‘Single’, and enter ‘16pt’ in the field labelled ‘after’. This is the amount of space to leave between paragraph blocks. Click ok.
E) Set your font to Times New Roman, size 12.
That’s it! Your references should be in good shape.
Bonus tip:
You’ll likely add / remove references in the process of editing, so it’s best to save the reference style for quick application in the future. Thankfully this is pretty easy:
select a reference that you just formatted by dragging over it with your mouse
Go to Format -> Style
Now select ‘New’
The selection will default to the format of the text you have selected (your reference), which is correct. Name this something like ‘APA Reference’, ensuring ‘Add to Quick style list’ is also selected, and click ok.
Now you can select unformatted references and simply select the style from the Home Ribbon:
Enjoy.
APA Formatting Book
APA: The Easy Way
While not specific to writing APA papers in MS Word, this books is super clear and provides a great guideline to the APA style.
While I recommend 'The easy way', The official APA publication manual is also worth a buy.
Until recently, I used Scrivener for all my writing projects. However, when I started to share drafts with my writing group and my advisors, everyone used Microsoft’s Word comments and track changes to mark up my writing. Rather than deal importing and exporting from Scrivener, I thought I would try Word again. When starting to use Word again after a long hiatus, I discovered that it had a Citation Manager built into it. Because I was no longer using Zotero for managing sources, I was excited – could this save me time in formatting my citations and bibliography? The short answer: no.
While the Citation Manger might work for some people, it will depend on how you prefer to cite your sources. If you use only parenthetical/inline citations, then I suspect Word’s Citation Manager might speed things along. I was not so lucky. The combination of using the Chicago Manual of Style and citations in footnotes was too much for Word to handle.
How it Works
Microsoft provides a series of videos that explain how to use the Citation Manager in Word for Mac users. Using the tool is pretty straightforward and I won’t rehash their videos here. Other sites can provide good tutorials for using the Citation Manager as well. https://facesever848.weebly.com/blog/skyview-app-for-mac.
Wordreference App Per Mac
Here is the basic idea:
1.) Open up the Citation Manager and add a source by typing in the bibliographic information
2.) Place your cursor in your document where you want to insert the citation, and double-click the name of source in the Citation Manager. If you want to edit the inserted source, click on it.
3.)If you want to create a bibliography, the Citation Manager allows you to do that as well.
Download Wordreference App
Why I Don’t Think I Will Use the Citation Manager
My original plan for this post was to write an in-depth review of the Citation Manager as I used it for a chapter of my dissertation. However, the software cut that plan short. The first source I entered and inserted gave me a parenthetical citation. If you create a footnote first and attempt to place a citation in the footnote, Word still gives you a parenthetical citation rather than the format that the Chicago Manual requires in footnotes. After a few searches, and watching the above videos, I don’t think Word supports the formatting needed for my chapter. Some people say that previous versions of Word for Mac provided better support, but since I only have the newest version, I can’t confirm it.
It seems like the Citation Manager might work well if you use inline citations, but if you are looking to put a Chicago-style citation in a footnote, I think you have to look somewhere else. https://facesever848.weebly.com/blog/tango-app-on-mac.
Wordreference Spanish
Do you have a streamlined way of managing citations or does Word’s Citation Manager work for you? Let us know in the comments.