Alphabetical Bibliography Ordering with Word 2007 ISO690 Numerical Style

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:04:00 -0700

In the course of preparing my senior thesis, we ran into a bit of trouble using Word 2007's built in Bibliography tools. While on the whole they provided a much nicer experience than third party tools such as RefWorks, we were initially unable to define the bibliography style as our Advisor requested.

The closest available style was ISO690 Numerical which inserts citations like '(1)', and orders the references in the bibliography in the order in which they are cited. Our advisor requested that citations look like '[1]' and the references be in alphabetical order.

Initially we tackled the problem by modifying the .XSL style sheet. With this we were successfully able to change the perentheses to square brackets, and do some minor reordering of the fields in the bibliography, but try as we might we couldn't get it to order alphabetically.

In the end we devised a work-around that, while a bit hacky still solves the problem until Microsoft (hopefully) updates the bibliography feature in Office 14.

In the beginning of our document we inserted citations to all of our sources in the order in which we desired them to show up in the bibliography. Then we just changed the text to be white on a white background.

Along with the minor .XSL tweaks we now were able to automatically generate the bibliography with whatever ordering we wanted.