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Problems in MS Word Citation generator

Anonymous
2018-06-19T22:56:04+00:00
  1. I have found the in-built citation generator in MS Word very helpful in most cases. However, there seem to be two major problems.  First, when you add multiple books by the same author in the same year, it should mark the years with a, b, c. For example, (Brook, 2014a), (Brook, 2014b) etc. But in Word, they are all added as (Brook, name of article 1, 2014), (Brook, name of article 2, 2014).
  2. Second, when you add a chapter from an edited book, the word (Ed.) should get added. But in Word, it is not added in the citation.
  3. I am wondering if anyone knows a solution to this. I figured out a manual way to handle the first problem. One can manually enter 2014a, 2014b in the year column of the source list and suppress the title by using the edit citation option.For the second problem, one possible solution is to convert the Bibliography to static text (by left click on the button to the left of update citations and bibliography option) and then adding the word (Ed.) or (Eds.) in the bibliographic fields.
  4. However, this is too much manual work and I was wondering whether there is any easier way around this?

PS- I am using MS Word 2007 and using the APA citation style.

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Answer accepted by question author

Paul Edstein 82,861 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2018-06-20T08:14:40+00:00

You put only author names for the relevant chapter in the author field and only editor names in the editor field. If a chapter author is also an editor, the name goes in both fields.

As for adding the a, b, c, etc. suffixes to years, that's going to be problematic. If you don't convert the citation & bibliography entries to static text, the edits will be lost immediately you do anything that causes Word to refresh field codes (e.g. printing the document). The alternative is to add the a, b, c, etc. suffixes to the years in the 'Manage Sources' dialogue itself - which means they'll appear that way in citations and the bibliography alike - but that has implications if you update the master list then want to reference the works in another document but don't reference all of them, since you may end up with unwanted or wrong a, b, c, etc. suffixes there.

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Answer accepted by question author

Paul Edstein 82,861 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2018-06-20T01:54:07+00:00

Word doesn't support the addition of the a, b, c, etc. suffixes to years. Instead the title & year are both output (though you can suppress either or both).

Referencing a particular chapter does not of itself warrant the addition of Ed. - what you seem to have is a composite work with one of more editors for the work as a whole and authors for individual chapters. In that case, separate citation entries are required for each chapter referenced and you should list the editor(s) in the 'editor' field and only the author(s) of the chapter concerned in the 'author' field. Such entries will then appear like:

Bacher, W., & Dembitz, L. N. (1906). Synagogue. In I. Singer, R. Gottheil, K. Kohler, C. Adler, G. Deutsch, M. Jastrow, et al. (Eds.), Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

Toy, C. H., Siegfried, C., & Lauterbach, J. Z. (1906). Philo Judæus. In I. Singer, R. Gottheil, K. Kohler, C. Adler, G. Deutsch, M. Jastrow, et al. (Eds.), Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

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  1. Paul Edstein 82,861 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2018-06-21T00:29:08+00:00

    PS. I really do hope that Word fixes these issues. No other citation managers seem to be having this problem, so it should be pretty easy for them to fix this issue. 

    Don't hold your breath - it's been that way since Word 2007 was released over a decade ago and the deficiencies in this and other referencing formats (e.g. Chicago) have been ignored ever since - the same flaws you're finding in Word 2007 also exist in Word 2010, 2013, & 2016. And all it would take to fix is for whoever is responsible for the xml stylesheets that underlie the referencing to have them coded correctly...

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  2. Paul Edstein 82,861 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2018-06-21T23:03:11+00:00

    ISTR there is an issue with the use of semi-colons vs commas in the bibliography field. I don't recall the details, though.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-06-20T08:05:16+00:00

    Hey Paul,

    Thanks for pointing it out. I did not notice the Editor column in the Edit source box. The problem of Edited books seems solved now by using that column. Thanks. Just a small query though, do I need to keep the names of the authors (of the book, not the chapter) in both the columns- i.e. Book Author and Editor? Or Do I need to put them only in Editor?

    Since suffix is not added to the years, then is manually adding them the only solution?

    Thanks.

    Cheers,

    Vivek

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