How to Check APA Citations in Microsoft Word

If you’re writing an academic paper in Microsoft Word, checking your APA citations can be one of the most time-consuming parts of the revision process. Here are several approaches, from manual review to automated tools, to help you catch errors before submission.

Method 1: Manual Review with a Checklist

The most basic approach is working through your paper with Word’s Find & Replace feature (Ctrl+F / Cmd+F) and a checklist of common issues:

• Search for “et al” — Check that every instance has a period after “al,” is not italicized, and has proper spacing.
• Search for “&” — Verify ampersands only appear inside parentheses. If you find one in narrative text, it should be “and” instead.
• Search for “(” — Scroll through parenthetical citations and check for missing commas between author and year.
• Cross-check the reference list — For each citation in the text, verify it appears in the reference list, and vice versa.

This method is thorough but extremely time-consuming, especially for long documents. A 200-page dissertation might have 500+ citations to verify individually.

Method 2: Using Word’s Built-in Tools

Word’s built-in citation manager (under the References tab) can help with some formatting, but it has significant limitations for APA checking:

• It generates citations and bibliographies but does not validate existing ones.
• It doesn’t check in-text citation formatting rules like et al. usage or ampersand placement.
• It requires you to have entered all sources into its citation manager first.

If you’ve been using Word’s citation manager from the start, it can keep your references consistent. But if you’ve typed citations manually (as most dissertation writers do), it won’t help you find errors in what you’ve already written.

Method 3: Web-Based Citation Generators

Tools like Scribbr, QuillBot, and Citation Machine can generate properly formatted citations and reference entries from a DOI or URL. These are useful for creating new citations, but they have a key limitation: they don’t check the citations already in your document. You would need to re-enter every source to verify formatting, which defeats the purpose for a completed paper.

Method 4: Automated Citation Checking Inside Word

The most efficient approach is a tool that scans your existing document and identifies errors at their exact location. This is what CiteLogos was built to do.

CiteLogos works as a Microsoft Word add-in that reads through your entire document and places Word comments at each location where an APA formatting issue is found. Each comment explains the specific error and provides a recommended fix. Because it works inside Word, you never have to copy-paste text into a web tool or work with a separate report.

Here’s what CiteLogos checks:

• In-text citations: et al. usage and formatting, ampersand vs. “and,” comma placement, alphabetical ordering of multiple citations
• Reference list: alphabetical ordering, italicization of titles and volumes, author formatting, DOI/URL formatting
• Cross-referencing: every in-text citation has a corresponding reference, and every reference is cited in the text

Which Method Should You Use?

For a short paper (under 10 pages), a manual review with a checklist may be sufficient. For longer documents, especially dissertations and theses, an automated tool will save hours of work and catch errors that manual review routinely misses. The cross-reference check alone—matching every citation to its reference entry—is nearly impossible to do reliably by hand in a long document.