Bibliography

[saded3415543]

So for university, I am writing a research paper and I have to use Indesign and I have to reference my sources and information, the problem is I have no idea how to create a bibliography, does anyone know how?

[Steve Werner]

Why are you doing this in InDesign and not in Microsoft Word? This is really what it's best at. You'll be struggling in InDesign, even if you're a long-term InDesign user.

As to a bibliography, my vague memory is that there are different standards, depending on what kind of research you're doing. Do a search on "bibliography format"

[John Mensinger]

There's no bibliography button in InDesign, but as Steve hinted, there is almost one in Word. That is, Word has "reference"-specific features that can get you at least part of the way to a correctly-executed bibliography. The rest is on you, and the conventions vary with the "style" in which your paper is to be written. This might be a presumption on my part, but if you're already engaged in writing a university research paper, and...

saded3415543  wrote

I have no idea how to create a bibliography...

. . . you may have missed something.

[Jongware]

Other than InDesign, Word is a writing tool and so there are more than a few "reference managers" available for it. These can insert any kind of reference in the running text (e.g. a number [1] or (2), possibly as a sequence (3, 5-8), or as names (Warnock & Geschke 1982); and a list of used references can be generated at the end of each chapter, numbered or sorted by first author, any way you wish.

Or so they say.

When done writing in Word, flatten all custom fields so the "live" references become plain text (see a Word tutorial for how to do that) and then you can safely import the text into InDesign for final formatting.

[Elissa5EAB]

Honestly, I am floored by all the snide remarks on this thread. In case people are still stumbling across this thread and being discouraged by the rude comments, you absolutely can use InDesign to put together your research paper and it is preferable to other approaches (e.g. Word) in many cases.

Jongware gave some good tips and I just wanted to add some specifics. InDesign is a great tool to use for layout when writing a research paper, especially one with lots of figures in it. However, you will probably save yourself a lot of headaches by drafting all your text in a word processor, like Word or LibreOffice. You can download a free app called Mendeley that has a plug-in for Word and LibreOffice, which will let you insert in-text citations and manage you bibliography for you. I highly recommend it. Once you have your final text, complete with the citations and bibliography from Mendeley, simply copy + paste it into InDesign. Everything should copy over in the correct format and be converted to plain text. The only downside of this approach is that if you have to make changes to your citations, you either have to make them in your Word document and then re-copy everything over, or make manual edits to your InDesign file. Not the end of the world, in my opinion. InDesign has saved me many long hours of figure- and table-wrestling in Word and if the price is that I have to manually fix my citations every once in awhile, so be it. 

As an aside, I have attended multiple R1 institutions and never was I taught how to make a bibliography or manage citations, it was something I had to teach myself. Being asked to write a research paper at University is how students learn to do these things - there is no shame in not knowing how to do it your first time!