Crosschecking Citations and References

Elizabeth is a dissertation coach and editor. She often needs to crosscheck the citations and references in a document to make sure that every reference is cited and every citation has a reference. She presently does this using a tedious manual approach, but she's wondering if she is missing a tool within Word (or from a third party) that would make this crosschecking easier.

There is no built-in function or tool within Word to accomplish the crosschecking. For any repetitive task, you may be able to create a macro to perform the crosschecking. Doing so, however, will require documenting the steps you follow and then converting those steps into the actual macro code that will accomplish those steps. (This is often a non-trivial task if your steps are complicated.)

There have been macros developed that may be helpful. One such free macro is called CitationAlyse, which is available here:

https://wordmacrotools.com/macros/C/CitationAlyse.txt

All you need to do before you run CitationAlyse (once it is installed on your system) is ensure that your insertion point is within the first reference in the reference list. The macro then creates, in a separate document, a list of the in-text citations and reference list entries in the text first by year and then alphabetically within each year. Miss-matches appear on their own. CitationAlyse works only with author-date referencing styles, and it does need to be carefully checked one-by-one.

If that doesn't do what you want, then you may need to turn to one of the commercial reference managers that are available. The major tools that people use are the following, in no particular order:

• EndNote
• ReadCube's Papers
• Zotero
• Mendeley

The biggest drawback to reference managers is that they typically are of value only when used while developing the document originally. (Which may make them of marginal use to Elizabeth since she is working with dissertations already written by others.) Even so, they can make managing references much easier for papers that rely on copious citations.

Reference managers run the gamut in pricing, and they can be difficult to learn and implement. (In other words, there may be a steep learning curve, depending on your referencing needs.) You will want to carefully evaluate whether one of these solutions may work for your needs.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13381) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.