How to Make a Table of Authorities in MS Word

A table of authorities, commonly used in legal documents, lists the references that provide the sources of various excerpts from legal articles, rulings and statutes that are used throughout a document. In essence, it is a bibliography. To create a table of authorities using Microsoft Word, the user must begin by marking citations, or selecting each "cited" phrase in the document, one at a time.

Instructions

1. Mark each citation by selecting the applicable phrase in the document and then clicking the "Mark Citation" button in the Table of Authorities group on the References tab of the Word ribbon. Alternatively, hold down the Alt+Shift+I keys. This keyboard shortcut will also work in Word versions prior to 2007.

2. Type the Long Citation version (the longhand description used in the table of authorities when the work is first cited), in the "Selected text" area of the Mark Citation window. Choose the category of the citation from the Category list. This will give you the option to group together all similar types of citations when the table of authorities is generated. Type the Short Citation version (the abbreviated description used when the work is cited again) in the "Short citation" area. Click the "Mark" button to mark the current citation only or click the "Mark All" button to mark all citations in the document that are identical to the current one.

   Repeat this process for each citation in the current document. Click the "Next" button to search for the next citation in the document or leave the Mark Citation window open and manually scroll the document to find the next citation.

3. Click to move your cursor to the position in the document where you'd like the table of authorities to appear. Click the "Insert Table of Authorities" button next to the "Mark Citation" button in the Table of Authorities group on the ribbon. Word 2003 users will go to the "Index" menu, choose "Reference", "Index and Tables" and then click on the "Table of Authorities" tab.

   Select the specific category you want to include in the Category list or choose "All" to include all categories.

   Enable the "Use passim" feature if you have quoted certain citations multiple times throughout the document. When the table of authorities is created, instead of showing individual pages in your document that refer to a particular case, for example, it will show the word "passim" (translated from Latin to mean "here and there") instead.

   Click the "OK" button to insert the table of authorities into the document.

References

• Microsoft Office Online: Create a Table of Authorities
• Microsoft Office Online: Create a Table of Authorities - Word 2003