How to Add Citations and Bibliography in Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a powerful word processor with many features. One of them is to add citations and a bibliography to give weight to your work and give credit to the sources that you have read and drawn on during your research. So how do you find, add, and edit citations and bibliography in Word?

Word is versatile and allows you to add quotes in many popular formats such as APA, MLA, Chicago-Style, GOST, IEEE, and ISO.

The steps are simple and the process is streamlined. We are subscribed to the Microsoft 365 plan and would use Microsoft Word installed on Windows 10. However, the steps should also be quite similar for other versions of Word available.

Let’s get started.

How to add, find, and edit quotes in Word

Let’s start by adding and editing quotes in Word.

Step 1: Open the Word document and click where you want to add quotes.

2nd step: On the References tab, click the arrow next to Style to select a citation style. The default is APA.

Step 3: Click Insert Quote just before the Style option to select Add New Source. Select the Add a new placeholder option if you want to create a placeholder and add the citation details later. A pop-up will appear to give the placeholder a name.

Step 4: You should display the Create Source pop-up window. Add relevant details like source type, author name, city, publisher, etc. Click OK to save the citation.

This is how the quote seems to play.

Step 3: Click Insert Quote just before the Style option to select Add New Source. Then select the Add new placeholder option if you want to create a placeholder and add the citation details later. A pop-up will appear to give the placeholder a name.

Step 4: You should display the Create Source pop-up window. Add relevant details like source type, author name, city, publisher, etc. Click OK to save the citation.

Once a citation has been created, you might want to find it and edit it later to correct a mistake or add more information.

Step 1: Click Manage Sources on the References tab.

2nd step: In the pop-up window that follows, you will find a list of all the quotes created in the Word document with a preview at the bottom. Select the quote you want to edit and click the Edit button. You can also sort citations by author, label, title, and year using the drop-down menu next to the search bar, which is another handy way to quickly find citations.

Step 3: Make the necessary changes to the citation in the pop-up window and click OK to save the changes.

Step 4: Click on “Show all bibliography fields” to add even more information about the cited source.

How to add, find, and edit a bibliography in Word

Once you have finished writing your document, you can add a bibliography to list all your sources at the bottom. We recommend that you create a new page for the bibliography to keep the document clean and easy to read and reference.

Step 1: On the References tab, click the Bibliography button. From the drop-down menu, click Insert Bibliography to add and format a bibliography from scratch or choose one of the templates to create one automatically. We will choose the first option, which is Built-In.

2nd step: A bibliography with all citations will be added where you placed the cursor under the Bibliography heading. In our case, there are two quotes.

And that’s all.

Now the bibliography would not be updated if you add more citations later. To update the bibliography manually, select the bibliography and click on the “Update citations and bibliography” button which should appear just above.

You don’t like the look and the reading of the bibliography? You can easily choose another format. Select the bibliography and click the arrow button next to the book icon to choose a different format.

Did you know that you can add source in one Word document and use it on another Word document? You don’t have to do anything more. Word would automatically save any sources you added as citations in a master list called “Master List of Sources”.

Again, just click the Manage Sources button under the References tab to find all of the sources you’ve added so far. We have already seen above how you can edit and manage sources here.

Now the sources are listed under the main list on the left. Select the source you want to add and click the Copy button to copy it to the current list on the right. You will need to do this for each source that you want to add to the current document.

Now you can add this source from the Insert Citation menu under the References tab.

So where are these sources or the master list stored? And why bother? It might come in handy in case you bought a new computer. You will find the main list named source.xml in the location below in the file explorer. Replace the word “username” with the name of your computer.

C:UsersusernameAppDataRoamingMicrosoftBibliography

Simply copy and paste the file to the same location on the new PC and you are good to go.

Source code

Microsoft Word is a powerful tool for researchers and writers. Word makes it easy to add citations and a bibliography that you can easily find and edit later. Once you add a source, you can cite it in any document in the future, which is a well thought out feature. Useful when you are working in a niche and find yourself citing the same sources over and over. It could save you a lot of time and effort. This is what separates a great tool from the rest. It saves you precious time with nifty little tips and tricks.