Academic writing requires careful planning and preparation on the front end, and the more time you spend on this preparatory work, the easier the actual writing process will be. An important thing to remember is this—whenever you can take shortcuts while writing your academic essay, article, thesis or dissertation, take them. It's the little things here and there that can save you a lot of big headache in the overall process. All that's required is a little foresight and knowledge of which shortcuts to take.
What is a citation generator tool?
A citation generator tool is one such shortcut that comes standard with most word processing programs. For this particular article, we'll look at Microsoft Word and its citation generator, which can be accessed by choosing References in the main menu of your working document. It's especially useful when you're writing about research in a thesis or dissertation in that it helps you keep track of the dozens of sources you will likely use over the course of your research.
How do I use Microsoft Word's citation generator tool?
This guide will walk you through the steps you'll need to take to generate both in-text and bibliography citations in your academic writing while using Microsoft Word to write your document.
Step 1
As you write, go ahead and input the information related to the article or source you're referring to or quoting. As you can see in the screenshot below, this is done by going to References, then choosing Insert Citation.
Notice that once you choose Insert Citation, you can plug in the Style that needs to be used to cite sources. For the purposes of this tutorial, I chose APA style formatting, but the current Microsoft Word program offers several other formatting styles to choose from, including APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, MLA, Turabian, and others. You'll want to make sure you choose the correct formatting style on each citation you generate through the References option, since the styles vary widely in how sources are cited both in the text and in the final bibliography generated.
Step 2
After choosing Insert Citation, a menu will show beneath allowing you to Add New Source.
Step 3
Once you choose Add New Source, a new window will pop up allowing you to create the citation for the source. The first drop-down menu asks for the Type of Source. You can choose between Book, Book Section, Journal Article, Article in a Periodical, Conference Proceedings, or Report.
Step 4
Since the example I'm showing is a journal article, I chose that as the Type of Source. I then entered information related to the source, including the Title, Journal Name, Year (of publication), Month (of publication), Pages (where the article can be found within the journal), and Volume number.
Step 5
After inputting the information for your source, click OK and the source will be saved to your project. You'll also see the in-text citation appear in your document at the point where you choose to Insert Citation. Microsoft Word will automatically generate the in-text citation in the correct format based on the citation style you chose when you added the new source.
Step 6
Continue to add each source to your working document as you write. When you have finished adding all of your sources, you will be able to create a Bibliography, References, or Works Cited list that is automatically generated for you in alphabetical order, and in the correctly formatted citation style you've chosen.
Step 7
To generate a Bibliography, References, or Works Cited page, simply click on the Bibliography button beneath the References main menu and you'll be given a drop-down box showing the different choices that are available.
After choosing Bibliography, the following page was automatically generated by Microsoft Word. In a real-world case, I would have put in multiple sources, and each would be listed in alphabetical order once the Bibliography is generated.
