Here's a nightmare scenario: finishing up your research paper, thesis, or dissertation with what feels like thousands of footnotes, you belatedly discover that you must add a complete bibliography at the end of the paper too. What to do?
- Jump out the nearest window (not recommended)
- Laboriously cut -and-paste from each footnote into the bibliography (will take a looong time)
- Use citation software to avoid this whole mess (this option is only available to those who can time travel; there is no easy way to import citations from Word into citation software. Instead, wise writers start their citation databases before they begin to write the paper.)
- Follow Allen Wyatt’s Creating a Bibliography from Footnotes Word Tip and save yourself a world of trouble!
Although Microsoft Word provides no automatic way to generate a complete bibliography from your footnotes, following Wyatt's Word Tips will make the process a whole lot easier and far less prone to error.
-- by Nora Wood