Improved APA citation format in Word 2007/2010?

Question

By default the APA citation in Word 2007 doesn't quite match APA style (e.g. it doesn't convert a citation to et. al. when the citation has been made previously and there are many authors). Is there a work around the provides the desired behavior?

Solution 1

You may do it manually for the second and succeeding citations by editing the field.

Right click on the citation and select the "Edit Field" option.

For example, if the original citation was this:

(Johnson, Meyer, Lewis, Czerny, & Carroll, 2013)

The citation field would be something like this:

CITATION John13 \l 1033

If you edit it to this:

CITATION John13 \n \t \l 1033 \f "Johnson, et al., " (The space before the last quotation mark is important!)

It becomes:

(Johnson, et al., 2013)

Solution 2

Try searching for "Word APA citation" or "BibWord APA". You can get an XSL file that you copy into the Word Bibliography\Styles subdirectory of your Word directory. I did that when I needed to use IEEE citation format, and it worked pretty well.

You may need to install the BibWord Extender to get it to say "et al.", not sure.

• installation
• IEEE style
• example APA XSL file

Comments

[russellpierce]

There are external citation managers, I've tended recently towards Mendeley because it is 'free'. I was hoping there was something more native to Word. I'm thinking you are right though, the built in manager just can't do the job.

[Adam Knowles]

Kudos for this, I didn't know about the \f (prefix) and \s (suffix) codes, they fix my problem!

[Chris Rogers]

Just a note that the edited field should have a space before the last quotation mark or there will be no space between the comma and the year. I edited your answer to correct. Hopefully the edit will be approved