Use RefNavigator to insert citations and format bibliography in Microsoft Word

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1.Introduction

Welcome to RefNavigator Word integration. Everyone who ever writes a scientific paper will encounter the bibliography issue. It’s really boring to maintain all citation numbers and format bibliography correctly. RefNavigator relieves you from the burden. A Word toolbar will appear after you install RefNavigator. You just need to select some references and all formatting routines are handled by RefNavigator. If you add or remove some citations, citation number and bibliography list will be updated automatically.

In this document, we will introduce how to insert and format citations automatically via RefNavigator Word integration.

2.  RefNavigator Toolbar Overview

After you install RefNavigator, a toolbar will appear in your Microsoft Word Application.

Currently RefNavigator supports Microsoft Word 2003 and Microsoft Word 2007 (both include all versions such as home version or professional version). The following two screen shots show the toolbar in Word 2003 and Word 2007:

3. Insert Your First Citation

OK, now open your MS Word and create a new blank document. Start RefNavigator main program and select one or more references in it.:

As we can see, four references are selected in the list. If you want to insert them as citations in Word document, just click the first button “Insert Selected References” in Word toolbar:

After click, those references will be inserted into current cursor position. Since this is the first time to insert citations, a bibliography will be automatically appended at the end of the article:

4.  Search and Insert Citations inside Word

In previous step, we select some references in RefNavigator main program. You can also select references to cite inside Word. Click the second button “Search and Insert” in RefNavigator toolbar, a dialog box will pop up and it enables you to search references:

Type some search key words and select one or more references in the result list, and then click “Insert”, the citations will be inserted into current cursor position.

5.  Select Formatting Styles

We just insert several citations and they are formatted in default style “Numbered”. In many cases we need to format the document in another style. You can click the “Styles” button in RefNavigator toolbar, which will open a dialog box as follows:

In this dialog box, you can select a bibliography style to format the document. RefNavigator supports more than 1500 popular biomedical Journal styles. After you select a desired style, click “OK” and all citations will be reformatted according to the new style.

If the existing styles do not meet your requirement, you can pick a most similar style and click “Edit Current Style”. RefNavigator will open an editor which enables you to make your own bibliography style:

6.  Edit Citation

The third button on the toolbar is “Edit Citation”. You can select a citation to edit after you insert it. Every citation RefNavigator inserts is a Microsoft Word “field” which is a variable, and Word usually shows it in grey-color background. You need to put your cursor into the “field” and then click “Edit Citation”. RefNavigator will open a new dialog box to allow you to remove or add new references into the citation:

7.  Refresh All

This button is easy to understand - it just refreshes all citations and bibliographies according to current style. If you have updated some references in RefNavigator main program, you can click the button to reflect the latest reference information.

8.  Generate Bibliography

This button will append a bibliography list at the end of current document if there is no bibliography yet. As mentioned earlier, a bibliography list will be appended automatically when you insert your first citation. So usually we only need this button when we accidentally remove the existing bibliography.

9.  Remove Field Codes

Usually this is the last step to finalize a paper.

As mentioned above, every citation is a Word “field”. Bibliography is also a “field”. Thus we have n+1 fields in a document if we have inserted n citations. Those fields are maintained and updated by RefNavigator automatically. You can manually update some citation texts, but those changes will be overwritten when you click “Refresh All”. Furthermore, if your RefNavigator library is deleted or corrupted, RefNavigator can’t update those fields anymore.

To avoid the above risks, you can click this button to convert all fields into plain texts. Since this operation is not undo-able, please only do it after you finish your document and make sure no more changes are required.

After the conversion, the document is just a common Microsoft Word document. It does not contain any RefNavigator-related fields and it does not have any dependency on RefNavigator library. You can safely make any manual changes on citation texts or bibliographies.

10.  Conclusion

Thank you for your patience to read this document. Hope RefNavigator can help you get more successes in your research career. Enjoy it!

For any questions or suggestions, please email to support@RefNavigator.com.

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