Tag: How to Format Bibliography Entries in Word

The Student Supplement for The SBL Handbook of Style has some specific requirements for how your essay’s bibliography appears on the page.¹

There are any number of common ways to fulfill these requirements that will also make that process harder than it has to be.

Fortunately, you’ve got some much better options for each step in creating a clean bibliography that has a proper

1. Top margin,
2. Heading,
3. Heading spacing,
4. First entry formatting,
5. Subsequent entry formatting,
6. First page pagination, and
7. Subsequent page pagination.

Requirements 1, 6–7 (Top Margin, Page Numbering)

You can carefully set up your essay’s pagination. Then, at the end of your essay body, all you need is a new “Section Break (Next Page).” That one insertion will move you to a fresh page to start your bibliography. It will also allow your page numbers to continue in sequence and in the proper places. You can then manipulate the top margin just like for your essay’s first page.

Requirements 2–3 (Heading)

You can specify the bibliography heading alignment, capitalization, and spacing to the first entry within the style for first-level headings.

Requirements 4–5 (Entry Formatting)

You can edit Word’s default “Bibliography” style so that any text you apply it to will have a hanging indentation of 0.5 inches and a blank line following every paragraph formatted with that style.

To do so,²

1. Go to the “Home” tab, and find the “Styles” section. You should see an arrow in the lower right corner of the section. Click this to expand the section into a panel.

2. If it’s not currently in use, the “Bibliography” style might be hidden by default. To start editing the style, click the “Manage Styles” button at the bottom of the Styles panel.

3. Sort the list of styles alphabetically. Find the style named “Bibliography.” Then, click “Modify ….”

4. Double check that the “Bibliography” style is set to use the same font face and font size as you’re using in the rest of your document. If not, make the necessary adjustments. Then, click “Format” in the bottom-left corner of the “Modify Style” dialog box and choose “Paragraph ….”

6. Under “Indentation,” find the dropdown box for “Special.” Choose “Hanging.” Word will then add 0.5 inches as the indentation distance, which happens to be what the Student Supplement requires. Under “Spacing,” select the number of points you want to add after each paragraph that will equate to one blank line. For example, if you’re using a 12-point font, you might add 12 points after the paragraph.³ Then press “OK.”

7. After you’ve gotten the style formatting as you want it, decide whether you’ll want to use this same style formatting in other documents based on the same Word template.⁴ If so, choose the “New documents based on this template” option at the bottom of the “Modify Style” dialog box.
8. Click “OK” to save the style formatting you’ve specified in the “Modify Style” dialog box. Click “OK,” “Cancel,” or the close button in the “Manage Styles” dialog box to return to your document.

Conclusion

Once you’ve edited the “Bibliography” style, you can move the formatting of bibliography paragraphs into the category of things you let Word do for you.

Combined with the other ways you can get Word to help you format a bibliography, this step will give you more consistent formatting with less work and fewer headaches.

And because of that, you can invest your time and attention not into bibliography formatting but into the people and projects that matter most.

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1. Header image provided by Freestocks. ↩

2. Here, I’m assuming you have a current version of Microsoft Word for Windows via Office 365. These instructions are based on v16.0.13127.20164. They should work on other recent versions as well. But you’ll notice greater differences in the process if you have an older version of Word. MacOS users may also notice some differences in these steps between the Windows and Mac versions of Word. ↩

3. If you’re using a standard font like Arial or Times New Roman, the actual point value for one line is closer to 13.81. For SBL BibLit, it’s closer to 18.67. You can use these values if you’d like to be more precise, but probably no one will fault you for selecting the same number of points spacing as you have for your font size.  ↩

4. For an overview of some helpful ways to work with templates in Word, see my Microsoft Word: The Emerging Biblical Scholar’s Step-by-Step Guide for Windows and MacOS. ↩

The Student Supplement for The SBL Handbook of Style has some specific requirements for your essay’s bibliography.¹

You can get the words on the page in your bibliography to look like the Student Supplement requires in a few different ways.

Unfortunately, some common approaches to formatting your bibliography have undesirable side effects.

What the Student Supplement Requires

Before I get into that, though, it’s helpful to review what the Student Supplement requires.

In sum, from the beginning of the bibliography, this is,

1. A new page with a two-inch top margin.
2. The word “BIBLIOGRAPHY” center-aligned and uppercased.
3. Two blank lines.
4. Your first bibliography entry, single-spaced with a hanging indentation of 0.5 inches.²
5. If you have more than one bibliography entry, you’ll add a blank line. Then, you’ll add your next entry, also single-spaced with a hanging indentation of 0.5 inches. And you’ll continue repeating this format until you’ve included all the bibliography entries you need.
6. On the bibliography’s first page, you’ll have a page number consecutive with the rest of the essay and centered in the bottom margin.
7. If you have more than one page to your bibliography, you’ll then have a page number right-justified in the top margin.³

How Not to Format Your Bibliography

For several of these features of the bibliography, there’s a pretty obvious way to get the text on the page to display like you need.

Unfortunately, these sometimes more obvious methods also have significant downsides. In particular, they can lead to a mess at the end of your essay.

So, they’ll end up costing you additional time, effort, and attention to manipulate the formatting of your bibliography.

For example, you might

• Press “Enter” repeatedly to get from the last line of your essay body to a new page. Then you might press “Enter” about four more times to get what looks like roughly a two-inch top margin. But then, if your essay body lengthens or shortens as you edit, you need to re-manipulate this spacing.
• Press “Enter” twice to get roughly two blank lines between the title “BIBLIOGRAPHY” and your first entry. But you’ll need then to remember or recheck the Student Supplement to confirm that that spacing is correct.
• Type out the first line of your first bibliography entry. Then you might press enter and tab over to type a second (or third) line for that same entry that looks like it’s spaced in from the left margin. Or you might format that second (or third) line with a first-line indent like most new paragraphs. In either of these cases, if you have to edit the bibliography entry, you might change where the lines need to wrap. And you’ll have to manually manipulate the formatting to produce the correct indentation. Or if your margin size changes from one project to another (e.g., from an essay with 1-inch margins to a dissertation with a 1.5-inch left-hand margin), copying and pasting the same bibliography entry will also mean that you need to manually adjust where the line breaks fall.
• Press “Enter” to create a blank line between each bibliography entry. But if you do this, the blank line might actually appear at the top of a page and so look like an enlarged top margin. In that case, you’d need to manually manipulate the spacing to insert or take out a blank line as appropriate.

Conclusion

In all of these scenarios, you have two choices. You can have an essay with a poorly formatted bibliography. Or you can spend unnecessary time and attention proofing and massaging your bibliography’s formatting to ensure you get things just right.

Obviously, neither of these alternatives is that good. You want a clean bibliography. And you want to spend your time and attention actually improving your essay’s content—not just manipulating its jots and tittles.

Fortunately, you’ve got some much better options for each step in creating a clean bibliography.

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1. Header image provided by Freestocks. ↩

2. A “first-line” indentation is the kind of indentation you might be most used to seeing at the beginning of a new paragraph. The first line is indented from the left margin by a certain amount (e.g., 0.5 inches). The remaining lines in that paragraph then start flush with the left margin. A “hanging indentation” is just the opposite. The first line starts flush with the left margin. All subsequent lines are indented from that margin by a certain amount (e.g., 0.5 inches). ↩

3. Melanie Greer Nogalski et al., Student Supplement for The SBL Handbook of Style, Second Edition, ed. Joel M. LeMon and Brennan W. Breed, rev. ed. (Atlanta: SBL, 2015), §§2.3, 2.11, 3.5. ↩