Degree symbol in citation with et al.

luisague

Hello, I would like to know if you can help me with the following inconvenience: from one moment to another cites with et al. incorporated the degree symbol. E.g. (Howell et° al., 2005). Stranger is that when I copy the quote and paste it somewhere else it doesn't contain this symbol.

Thanks in advance

bwiernik

That sounds like it’s not actually a symbol present in text but rather a non-breaking space and you have the proofreading marks enabled in Word (these make spaces and other non-printing characters visible). You can turn off the display of these symbols by clicking the backwards P symbol on the Home tab in Word.

CrisLP

This was a very helpful anwser. I can add that if you really need to get rid of this symbols, which won't be printed but I understand that they can be a bit annoying, you can do a simple "find and replace", even if it sounds dumb, just "find" for spaces " " and "replace" with spaces " ". Word won't discriminate between both type of spaces but it will change them. The only problem with this is that when refreshing Zotero will ask you if you want to update manually override reference, so if you go this route is better to do it at the end when you are done adding references. I hope it helps.

dstillman

@CrisLP: You really don't want to run find/replace across all your citations — as you say, doing so will break citation updates going forward. If there's an errant character, you should fix that in the data itself in Zotero and do a Refresh in the document.

If you can reproduce getting a character like this from a Zotero import, let us know the exact steps and we can try to prevent it.