Using Bibtex in MS Word 2015 (Mac OS)

BibTeX is a reference management software for formatting lists of references. It makes it easy to cite sources in a consistent manner. However, BibTex is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system.

On the other hand, Microsoft Word is still the most commonly used text editor and used in the group to share documents. Thus, I use BibTex to manage the bibliography and use MS Word to write documents.

One of the most famous reference manager software integrated into Word is EndNote, but unfortunately it is a very expensive and not open-source software. In Windows OS, there is a awesome plug-in called “Bib4Word”, but it is not usable in Max OS.

This post will describe how to use BibTex in MS Word in Mac for free.

To organize BibTex, I am using JabRef, which is an open-source and free reference manager. Please follow the following steps:

1. In JabRef, export the bibliography in MS Word 2008 xml format
2. Name the file Sources.xml (case sensitive)
3. In Mac OS with MS Word 2015, go to ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.word/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office.
4. Rename the original Sources.xml file to Sources.xml.bak
5. Copy the generated Sources.xml in this folder
6. Restart MS Word.

Now you can choose citations from the list.