Customize field order for creating reference sources in MS Word

June 14, 2020 9:05 PM

Is it possible to customize the order in which the bibliography fields appear when creating a new citation source in MS Word (Office 365 or MS Word 2016)? At the moment the fields I use most are near or at the bottom of the list.

The Create Source window that contains all the bibliography fields is a fixed size. To view and enter data for all the fields requires scrolling.
          Most of my references are from journal articles, and I have to scroll down in the window to get to the fields I frequently use: Volume, Issue, and doi. Is there any way of customizing the field order so I don't have to continually scroll to enter data? That is, can the fields for Volume, Issue, and doi be moved to the top half of window?
          I have no programming or coding skills, but there are a bunch of people I work with who do and they've offered to help.

posted by angiep to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: One way to do it would be to use the tab to move between fields, instead of scrolling, though that doesn't solve your problem.

You can make custom styles for bibliographies, to omit fields you don't use and prioritise ones you do, but it looks like kind of a pain (involving XML markup). It seems the existing bibliography types (Book, Journal Article, etc.) that Word uses are hard-set, like the dialog box for entering citations.

If your work is at the stage where you're doing significant data entry of journals and citing them, you're probably at the stage where a reference manager like Zotero would save you time and pain—and which also has a 'new item' GUI which is adjustably sized, not involving scrolling.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:14 PM on June 14, 2020

Response by poster: Thanks, Fiasco. That was the only solution I found as well. I thought I'd ask here, because MetaFilter. Unfortunately, I'm almost finished writing my dissertation, so it's a bit late to use a reference manager. But I'll throw this over to my genius colleagues and see what they say.
posted by angiep at 7:54 AM on June 15, 2020