At some point, we all have had to sit down and type in a letter, essay, report, thesis, poem, novel, email, etc. Having gone through high school and college, I have had my fair share of writing for academia with special attention to content and format. One of the recurring pains from back then and until today is having to stop writing to search sources and write down citations or references.
Keeping track of your sources is a pain
Back in college, I used to write the citations textually, and then write the references at the end of the documents word by word. I painfully remember being in the library, having printouts besides my laptop with APA and MLA styles guidelines. I had to make sure I was doing the formatting of the references and citations just right. Several years later, I started my master studies and a friend of mine showed me the power of Word to deal with references. I was shocked by how much better my life would be and I wanted to tell everyone.
Now that I am wrapping up my master’s thesis, I am diving deep in the referencing world, with more than 70 sources. So I thought I would share with you the workflow I use with Microsoft Word for keeping track of my research.
1. Do a first draft without references
Imagine starting to write recommendations for reducing energy costs in your building. You develop an outline of the document and you starting to write the good stuff. Your brain is flowing, your fingers a-typing, and you feel progress at your fingertips. Somehow, you want to argue that consuming less energy might save some cash, but you do not know by how much would that be or from where in the building.
What do you do? Do you stop and Google away until you find the answer from a reference? No! You keep the progress going and the fingers flowing. I have made the mistake of going on a tangent line at this point and start researching. Then, at some point, I realise that I do not even need this sentence anymore. What a complete waste of time.
What I would do is write the sentence and leave a placeholder for the things I do not know yet. For example:
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by TBD°C overnight for the building would save as much as $TBD. (REF)
Imagine the building is in Latin America where air conditioning would have to be turned on to cool down the inside temperature and deal with humidity. We can take an educated guess that there is a potential to save money by increasing the temperature overnight, rather than keeping it the same as during the day. But we do not know by how much, and we do not have a reference so we write a placeholder in the meantime.
I like to write TBD, which stands for “To be determined” because once I have the sources, I can search (Ctrl + F) for “TBD” and replace these letters with the information from the sources. The same goes for “(REF)”.
2. Search for references for the first draft
Now that you have gone through your first draft, or that you absolutely need to know a specific source of information to continue writing, it is time to research and find those references.
Perhaps you find a couple of references from the European Commission and from the European Union explaining how much a typical building like yours could save cash by increasing the AC temperature overnight. One of them says that raising it 2°C saves 5% of the energy bill. The second one says that raising it 5°C saves 20%. Good enough for now.
3. Add the reference to your sentences, rewrite if needed
At this point, you can add the information you found in your sentences. Rewrite your sentences to make sense with the sources. For example, we found two references that mention two different numbers and expressed the savings in the percentage of energy bill rather than the total amount. So, the sentence needs a few changes.
From this:
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by TBD°C overnight for the building would save as much as $TBD. (REF)
To this:
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2 to 5°C for buildings similar like ours, would save as much as 5 to 20% of the energy bill. (REF)
I leave the (REF) part the same for now.
4. Add your references to Word’s Source Manager
Word’s source manager has saved me a ton of time. Go to References in the ribbon, then click on the Manage Sources button.
This will open up the Source Manager window.
My Source Manager already has a bunch of sources, yours might be completely blank if you have not used it before. Let us go through the window together.
First, to the left side, you have a “Master List” of sources. Every time you add sources for different Word files, they will be stored in this list, so that you can find them in any document you work on in the future. On the backend, Word saves a file in your computer with the information of the sources.
If you already have some sources here and you want to use them in this document, you would press the “Copy ->” button to copy the source to the “Current List” box. This box is blank on my window because I have not added any sources in my energy savings file yet. Let’s add what we found.
Press on the “New…” button, and another window pops up. This window is an entry form where you can select and enter all the info you have from your sources. You can select the language and type of source, and also type in all the specific info.
Once you are done, the source will be saved in both your Current List and your Master List. This is how the window looks like for me once I finished with one source.
Pressing OK moves the source to both lists:
And now these sources are part of the Word document. On the left side of the source text, you will see a checkmark after you have referenced this source in the file. Also, you can see how the source would look like when cited and referenced in the bibliography.
Inserting a citation after sentences
You entered the sources. Now, you gotta use them. Going back to our sentence, we will select the point right before the period and then go to References / Insert Citation. All the sources in the document will appear as a list and you select the source you want and it is automatically placed in your sentence, following the referencing style you have selected in the References menu.
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2 to 5°C for buildings similar like ours, would save as much as 5 to 20% of the energy bill (EC, 2019). (REF)
Great! Now erase the (REF) we had before. The thing is, we are using two sources at once for the same sentence. The citation is not just text, it is a field. How do you deal with that?
Using two sources in the same citation
We first go to the Source Manager and find the placeholder names of both sources. These are the codes that identify each source.
For EC: Eur19
For EU: Eur191
Now, going back to the citation. We right-click on it and select “Edit field…”
A window pops up that has the field codes for the citation. I do not understand what this is, but I can tell you what to do to add another source to the same citation. What you see below in blue highlight is what I added, while the white background shows what was there before.
Adding “\m ” and then the source code we want to add “Eur191” tells the citation that another source will be in the same field. Press enter and see the results:
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2 to 5°C for buildings similar like ours, would save as much as 5 to 20% of the energy bill (EC, 2019; EU, 2019).
I am going to show you a few other examples of what might come up when dealing with your sources.
Different citations with the same author and the same year
Imagine that the two sources we found come from the EC, rather than EC and EU. Also, imagine that we have more than one sentence where we need the citations, that we explicitly mentioned the name of the second source sources and that the first source was actually a quotation.
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2°C for buildings similar like ours, would “save as much as 5% of the energy bill” (REF1). The EC also mentions that increasing it by 5°C would save as much as 20% (REF2).
First, let us add the sources individually.
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2°C for buildings similar like ours, would “save as much as 5% of the energy bill” (EC, 2019). The EC also mentions that increasing it by 5°C would save as much as 20% (EC, 2019).
Three problems. One is that the citation looks like it is the same in both cases when the sources are different. Second is that the last citation should not include the “EC” part since we already wrote, “The EC also mentions…”. The third is that a quotation should include the page of the document where it was extracted from.
Problem 1 | Add suffixes to the citations
Adding letter suffixes to the citations will differentiate them. We will add an “a” for the first citation and a “b” for the second one. To do this, we again right-click the citation and open the “Edit field…”
In this case, add “\s ” to signal a suffix and then type “a” for the first citation and repeat with a “b” for the second one. This is the result:
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2°C for buildings similar like ours, would “save as much as 5% of the energy bill” (EC, 2019a). The EC also mentions that increasing it by 5°C would save as much as 20% (EC, 2019b).
Problem 2 | Remove author from the second citation
Now to remove the author from the second citation. Click on the citation and a drop-down button will appear to its right side. Press the button and then “Edit Citation”.
To remove the author, make sure the checkboxes for “Author” and “Title” are checked, but “Year” is unchecked. Then press OK.
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2°C for buildings similar like ours, would save as much as 5% of the energy bill (EC, 2019a). The EC also mentions that “increasing it by 5°C would save as much as 20%” (2019b).
Looking good.
Problem 3 | Add page number to the first citation
Finally, we go back to the source and see that the quotation comes from page 4 of the document. We follow the same “Edit citation” process from Problem 2, and write down “4” under “Pages”.
Increasing the overnight air conditioning temperature by 2°C for buildings similar like ours, would save as much as 5% of the energy bill (EC, 2019, p. 4a). The EC also mentions that “increasing it by 5°C would save as much as 20%” (2019b).
I have not figured out how to make the suffix go right after the year in the first citation, which can be a problem, and at this point, I am questioning why I even go through so much trouble to have citations like this instead of typing them in myself.
There are many more things to take care of regarding sources. For now, I think this is enough. Good luck in your Wording work. Future posts could be about other uses of the reference manager, like setting up the references or introducing the Mendeley add-in (another source manager).
Everything written here is a personal reflection and is by no means educational, financial or professional advice in any way.
Please feel free to cite and refer reliable sources in the comment section down below.