This MS Word macro automates reordering of references in scientific manuscripts.
In scientific papers, the references are often required to be numbered in order they appear. Usually, reference managers would take care of it easily. In the real world, however, not everyone always uses reference managers. In collaborative papers it is often a necessity to eventually get rid of the field codes and edit the references manually because reference managers, unfortunately, have trouble understanding citations made in another reference manager and don’t understand manually entered references.
When references entered manually, after several editing cycles the order became messed up, the bibliography may contain entries that are not cited anymore, and citations may have no corresponding entries in the bibliography. Reordering the references and fixing these problems manually is a very unexciting mistakes-prone task, especially if the paper contains hundreds of references.
I made the macro because I needed it myself. I had reordered references manually quite often. Not only this task was unexciting, it was stressful sometimes when it had to be done within minutes of a deadline. I created this macro when I had a quiet week and it was a game changer, so I spent some more time to write documentation and make it available to others.
