International Relations: Pre-Dissertation Prep

Before you start your dissertation, you should make yourself comfortable with three things: your citation management system, your grasp of Microsoft Word's formatting and citation tools, and your discipline's style manual. 

• Citation management is an essential part of your research workflow. As you find sources, you should save the citation information. Citation management tools like Zotero and Mendeley require some initial effort to set up and learn how to use, but are an essential part of many scholars' research process.
• Microsoft Word includes tools that make formatting and citation much easier. Ideally you'll start using these tools in the earliest drafts of your dissertation, even in your coursework before your dissertation proposal. Salve provides free access to Microsoft products including Word (under "Technology Resources for Students," click on "Office 365"). For initial formatting and setup of your dissertation, we suggest you use the desktop Word application rather than the cloud-based Office 365 version.   
• Because you will need to refer to it often, you should purchase your own copy of your discipline's citation manual. At Salve, the humanities and international doctoral programs use the Turabian manual. The behavior analysis and nursing doctoral programs use the APA manual. 

McKillop Library provides paid access to Refworks citation management software, but over the next 3 or 4 years we will be phasing use of Refworks out in favor of Zotero. You can learn about Refworks in the Refworks tab of this guide. 

Zotero is a free citation management tool. It works with three parts: a desktop application, a website version, and a browser extension. You can create an account online and then download the desktop application and the browser extension. It works well with the Chrome browser. 

Note: the video below is a great introduction to Zotero, but Salve doesn't mean to endorse the creator's other services.

A proviso: the creator notes that Zotero perfectly formats your references. This is not accurate. Zotero's citations are only as good as the metadata it scrapes from a database, PDF, or webpage. This means that you should double check your citations to confirm that they conform to your citation manual's formatting requirements.  

This guide is intended to help you find answers to common questions about formatting a dissertation in Microsoft Word including:

• properly formatted pagination,
• creating an automatically generated table of contents,
• and inserting endnotes and footnotes.

Salve provides free access to Microsoft products including Word (under "Technology Resources for Students," click on "Office 365"). For initial formatting and setup of your dissertation, we suggest you use the desktop Word application rather than the cloud-based Office 365 version. 

When formatting your document, refer often to your style manual and the examples it provides. You may also find it helpful to refer to the other pages on this guide for Turabian and APA formatting requirements.  If you have questions, feel free to contact your librarian, but also feel empowered to use a search engine for your question. Librarians often Google the answers to technical questions ourselves!

Pagination

There are many ways to add pagination to your dissertation. Humanities and INR students may follow the instructions in the student-created Sample Turabian dissertation which you can find in Turabian Formatting Tips box on the Turabian Dissertation Formatting page of this guide. 

You may also review the video below to learn how to paginate in Word. While we reviewed the video and believe it provides good information, we do not intend to endorse the creator's other services. You should review the pagination and header requirements for your department's recommended style (APA or Turabian/Chicago) before watching. 

Table of Contents

If your program style manual requires a table of contents, we recommend you use Word's auto-generated table of contents function. This allows you to automatically update your table of contents if you make edits to your document. The below video provides a concise description of how to do this. The key is using Word's headings. 

Inserting footnotes or endnotes

Humanities and INR students can look at the below video to see how to insert footnotes or endnotes in word while applying the Turabian manual's citation style for footnotes or endnotes.  APA does not use footnotes or endnotes so nursing and behavior analysis students can disregard this video.