Short answer: no.
What's Wrong With It? (By Citation Style)
MLA:
Only supports the outdated 7th edition, for starters (MLA is currently 8th ed.). As of a 2016 support thread, MS had no plans to update it. (And I believe it, because it's still the wrong version over 3 years later!)
- For some reason it italicizes article titles and not websites (and gets the period placement wrong accordingly) -- see Carter example in screenshot below, especially.
- Sometimes the source manager only gives you a place to put website and not the article at all, which is somehow even worse.
- Highly noticeable outdate citation elements also include the label "Web." and pointy brackets around the url.
These citations are not correct, for the record.
APA:
Outdated now that APA has updated to the 7th edition. (Word uses APA 6.) While there were several notable changes, it didn't have a complete overhaul the way MLA did -- but still, we don't recommend it because:
- For some reason it places the name of the website in the “Retrieved from” url statement and includes a colon where there shouldn’t be one.
- There’s no field in the citation tool for a site publisher to be specified at all, either, for when that would be needed/important.
- AND look at that, it italicized the name of the web PAGE (article) but not the webSITE.
- It’s smart enough to abbreviation the author’s first name even if you write it out, but it doesn’t know to write the article title in mostly lower case.
Chicago:
Out-of-date by an edition (16th instead of 17th). This one might be okay because CMOS 17 didn't make very many changes to citations...but based on the number of problems with MLA and APA, we wouldn't trust it very far.
Works Cited/References List:
Note also that for all styles, the automatically-generated works cited page never formats correctly per the style guide. Even with the default font set to TNR 12 for text, it always applies Word “Heading 1” style to the title of the list (big, blue, sans serif, left-justified) rather than properly matching the rest of the document and being centered.
