A Quick Way to Setup APA 6th Referencing in MS Word

References are a critical part of any academic assignment. Universities/colleges are very particular about the references and expect their students to acknowledge others’ work that they use for their assignments properly. Referencing carries high marks in academic assignments and failure to do so results in a penalty or low grade. Hence, the importance of references in the assignment should not be overlooked at all. Referencing, as defined by scholars, is a way of acknowledging the contribution of other writers/researchers in the work. When any assignment is done using the ideas and research of the others, it should definitely have it. References are sometimes also referred to as citations or bibliographies. It is a separate page for any assignment at the end of the work. It shows that you have given proper credit to the other person for his research. It is crucial to understand the importance of referencing in work.

Significance of Referencing

Referencing is a way of providing evidence for the claims made in the assignment and increasing the authenticity of the work. This puts a good image on the tutor as he assumes you know about the subject and field. However, references put in the assignment should be genuine and should always be done in the style required or applicable to the university. It should be noted that reference should be traceable so that your tutor can access the link and cross-check if the information from the source is taken from there or not. For instance, referencing has a high weightage in an essay as the author is likely to make a lot of claims that should be backed by proper sources.

Setting up APA 6th Referencing in MS Word

There are different referencing styles and it depends upon the university itself which one they expect their students to use. For instance, some of the commonly used referencing styles are APA, Harvard, Chicago, MLA, etc. Students can face hassle when setting their references in Microsoft Word. For new students, this is a big problem and they might need guidance to do it. Hence, we provide here a quick sneak peek of the setting APA 6th Referencing in MS Word. It should be noted that Word generates the references list automatically from the sources that have been used for developing the best assignment. Word adds the source every time a new citation is added to the document.

• When working in MS Word, the first step is to click the References tab on the top. Since we are doing APA 6th Referencing, choose APA from the drop-down next to the Style. Only this step is different for setting up the document in other referencing styles.
• Then you should click at the end of every sentence that should be cited.
• You should click the Insert Citation tab and choose Add New Source here.
• A Create Source box will open and here you need to put all the details of the citation.
• After this is done, the citation gets added to the list of references available. This removes the need to put the details of the same citation again.
• Once the in-text citations are done, you can simply create a page at the end, citing all the references used in the assignment.

Although this process is for APA 6th Referencing Style, you can set up any reference style in MS Word using the same process. All you have to do is to choose the correct style from the drop-down and follow the same process.