While working on the Literature Review part of your Project Report or Research paper, you might have felt the need to cite external research articles, journals, conference papers, reports, etc.
While we were working on our academic projects and assignments, our faculties insisted that we add the references to external articles at the end of your project report strictly in APA format. After spending too much of time on over engineering APA format, I realized that I was spending too much time typing the article references in APA format.
Fortunately, I got to learn that Microsoft Word has an inbuilt Citation and Referencing feature using which I can eliminate errors in referencing formats which might creep in while manually typing the article reference. More over using this feature of MS word, I can now keep my brain in relaxed mode which used to be hyperactive while working on manual formatting of citations.
You can add citations in to your research paper in the following way:
- Click on the “Reference” tab of MS Word, following tools would be shown in the toolbar area.
Citations - Figure 1 - Click on the third tool titled “Insert Citation”.
Citations - Figure 2 - Select the format you want, either APA 6 or IEEE or other format from the Style Drop down menu.
Citations - Figure 3 - Click on “Add New Source” option from the drop down menu.
Citations - Figure 4 - Enter the article information in the next dialog box as shown in the below image and click on OK button.
Citations - Figure 5 - If you have selected APA format, you would get text like “ (Lewis, 2017)” at your cursor location.
- Similarly you can cite all your external references using the same “Insert Citation” option.
- Once you have cited all your references in your project report, you would be required to show the references probably at the end of your project report.
- To display the details of the reference articles in your selected format, Click on the “Bibliography” button in the toolbar.
Citations - Figure 6 - On clicking, the tool will expand with many style options as shown below. You can select either of the style option or select the last option “Insert Bibliography” to insert in plain text format.
Citations - Figure 7 - Now the reference has been inserted and it will show something as shown below:
Lewis, J. (2017). Study of Consumer Behaviour in Fashion Sector. Journal of Marketing, 45-51.
Using the References tool in MS Word, instead of manually typing the article information in the required APA or IEEE format, would eliminate any errors in the format of the citation.
Hope this article would help you reduce formatting hassles while referencing any article in your project or assignment.