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GiovanniMarin

BUG or wanted feature in the citation/references updatin in Word (2013 and before)

I'm having some trouble with the citation feature in word and this is happening to a lot of other people in many different word versions so I'm starting to think that it's a wanted feature. The image is much more clear than me explaining so here it is:

As you can see I'm not using in the text the citation [9] and word knows it since in the source manager is not marked as used but when I update the reference field the unused references appear at the end even when are not used. When I remove them from the current list in the manager the problem disappears. Is it the way word handle references or is it a bug unsolved since at least word 2007? Because I my view this way of working it's rather unlogical.

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Replies (1)

Guessed

I am not privy to what the MS thinking actually was but I would think this is by design.

Think of it the other way around. If you wanted the bibliography to include references to documents that you read and considered while preparing your document but didn't have a direct reference to it in your text, how would you get it to appear in the bibliography. The answer is, just add it to the current list. If you don't want uncited entries to appear in the bibliography, then you can always review your citation list and remove anything not cited.

HOWEVER, what I do consider a bug in Word 2010 is this. There appears to be no difference between adding a Bibliography or a Works Cited (other than the heading at the top). I would expect the Bibliography to show the full list attached to the document but the Works Cited should ONLY display the entries which were indeed cited.

Andrew Lockton
Melbourne Australia

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