Creative Passion
Posted on by Creative Passion

Easily collate, standardise & add bibliography to Word, InDesign or WordPress

Easily collate, standardise & add bibliography to Word, InDesign & WordPress

Collating, standardising and adding bibliographies can be time-consuming. And when you have pages and pages of references, the last thing you want to do is manually fix the formatting.

Watch our video for practical tips to do it quickly and accurately – and then import your bibliography into Word, InDesign or WordPress.

When clients send mixed-format references (for example, full first names vs initials), manually tidying a long bibliography is painful. The quickest way to collate and standardise citations is to use BibGuru (bibguru.com) – paste a DOI or URL, click Add, choose your citation style, then copy the formatted bibliography.

Microsoft Word (keeps italics automatically)

  • Go to bibguru.com > Get started
  • Paste a DOI or URL > click Add
  • If it’s not found, use Search (title, author, ISBN) or More to add books, chapters, etc
  • Choose your citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc)
  • Click Copy to copy the formatted bibliography
  • Paste into Word – italics come through correctly
  • Save the file as a .docx if you’ll place the list into InDesign later

Tip: The free version shows ads, but the output copies fine.

Adobe InDesign (retain italics via Place)

  • First paste the BibGuru bibliography into Word and save as .docx
  • In InDesign, go File > Place… and select the .docx
  • In Import Options, enable the text style options you prefer (for example, preserve styles and formatting)
  • Click into your text frame to place – italics are preserved

If you paste directly from the browser into InDesign, italics are likely to be lost; placing a .docx keeps them.

WordPress (paste in Visual mode)

  • Click into the post or page editor and switch to Visual (not Text/HTML) mode
  • Paste the copied BibGuru bibliography
  • WordPress imports italics as proper emphasis – no extra cleanup required
  • Update or preview the page to confirm headings, spacing and lists look right

Troubleshooting:

  • If a DOI doesn’t return the right record, try the article title or author in Search, or add via More > specific source type
  • After pasting, spot-check capitalisation and punctuation per your house style

Need help making your reports, white papers or research more consistent? Call 3366 8166 or contact us today — we’d love to help streamline your workflow.