RefWorks (www.refworks.com) can be used with a word processor document to create either endnotes or footnotes. Endnotes and footnotes both contain some kind of in-text citation but differ in where the formatted citations appear. With endnotes the references appear in a list at the end of the document with a title like “References” or “Bibliography” or “Literature Cited.” With footnotes the formatted citations appear at the bottom of the page that contains the footnote. Papers written in the sciences often tend to use endnotes, whereas the humanities tend to use footnotes. (This rule, however, is not etched in stone.) The discussion that follows will focus specifically on creating footnotes using Microsoft Word 2007 and RefWorks.
RefWorks itself does not create the footnote. You create the footnote using your word processor, and then use RefWorks to insert the literature citations into the footnote and to subsequently format the references according to a particular bibliographic format. Here are the steps involved:
1. In Word 2007, place your cursor at the point in the text where you want to insert a footnote.
2. Click “References,” then “Insert Footnote.” A superscript is inserted into the text and a corresponding footnote created at the bottom of the page.
3. Next, making sure your cursor is in the newly-created footnote at the bottom of the page, click “Add-Ins,” then “Write-N-Cite.” (This of course assumes that you have already installed the RefWorks Write-N-Cite tool; go here if you have not.) The Write-N-Cite window will appear; log in using your RefWorks Log-in Name and Password.
4. From the list of your RefWorks references that appears in the Write-N-Cite window, click “Cite” for the ones you wish to insert into the footnote. A list of reference placeholders will be constructed inside of the footnote in your Word document.
5. Repeat as necessary for additional footnotes. You can also insert generic notes into your footnotes in addition to literature citations by simply typing something into the footnote instead of inserting a reference from RefWorks. And you can also intersperse your own text with RefWorks citations within the same footnote. Don’t forget to save your document frequently, and make multiple backup copies if it’s important (e.g., a thesis).
6. When ready to format the references in your footnotes, click “Bibliography” in the Write-N-Cite window. First, choose an output style. And here is where it gets a little tricky, because not all RefWorks output styles work with footnotes. You must choose a style that has the word “Notes” or “Notes & Bibliography” in the title. For example, we will use the “Turabian 7th Edition (Notes)” style. The word “Notes” indicates that this style will produce correctly-formatted citations in your footnotes. If you choose a style that does not have the word “Notes” in the title the style will not produce a fully-formatted citation, like this:
D. Schluter, “Estimating the Form of Natural Selection on a Quantitative Trait,” Evolution 42, no. 5 (1988), 849
but instead will just insert an author-date text citation into the footnote, like this,
(Schluter 1988)
which we definitely don’t want.
So after choosing, for example, Turabian 7th Edition (Notes), click “Create Bibliography,” and the formatted citations should appear in your footnotes.
NOTE: Many of the RefWorks output styles that work with footnotes will also produce a list of formatted references at the end of the document. To turn off this feature you must edit the output style, requiring use of the Output Style Editor. What follows is an example of doing this using the Turabian 7th Edition (Notes) style.
1. Log in to your main RefWorks account at www.refworks.com (you can’t edit styles using Write-N-Cite).
2. From the menu, click “Bibliography.”
3. Select the output style that you wish to modify, in this case Turabian 7th Edition (Notes).
4. Click the Edit button. The Output Style Editor window will open.
5. The output style is read-only, so you must make a copy of the output style within your RefWorks account and make your changes to the copy. To do this, click the “Save As…” button, and save the style using a different name. For this example we’ll name the copied style “Turabian 7th Edition (Notes) modified.” (You have to click the Save As… button a second time after entering the new name for the style.)
6. The Output Style Editor should now contain your saved copy of the Turabian 7th Edition (Notes) modified style. The Editor contains all of the details of the style, so it looks complicated, but we only need to change one thing. Click the tab labeled “Notes,” then click the button labeled “Note Settings.” Within the Note Settings box, uncheck “Include References in Bibliography.” Click the Save button, and then exit the Output Style Editor.
7. Back in Write-N-Cite, click “Tools,” choose “Display Unformatted Citations,” then click “Unformat.” Your Word document will then revert to unformatted citations.
8. To apply the modified style, click “Bibliography” in Write-N-Cite, choose the Turabian 7th Edition (Notes) modified style, then click “Create Bibliography.” Your footnotes should now contain correctly formatted citations, and there should be no list of references at the end of the document. (If the edited style does not appear in the list of styles, close Write-N-Cite, then restart it and log in again, and the changed style should then be available.)
