Bibliography in Word

Niya.B

Hello, I'm new to Zotero.
I am writing a Literature Review on Word, Mac OS 10.15.7
When I copy or just drag text from Zotero desktop application to Word, an automatic citation is generated, showing the author, date and page of the copied text.
However, this citation is not included in the bibliography on Word. I have to Add citation manually, only then it is listed in the bibliography. Is this a bug?
I thought that the whole point of using a reference manager is to get the citations automatically in the bibliography.

The confusing thing is that there is a citation coming in with the copied text but this is not recognised as citation...
Can someone help to clarify please?

dstillman

That's what the plugin's Add/Edit Citation button is for.

You can drag to any text field with Quick Copy, but that just gives you plain text. There's no way for the plugin to recognize those citations.

Read through Using the Zotero Word Plugin if you're new to the plugin.

Niya.B

I still can't see why the pasted text carries an automatic citation but this citation is plain text and not an actual linked citation and not listed as bibliographical reference.
I found a work around: drag text from PDF to a note, Insert note on the Word plug in. In this case, the citation is a linked citation and is listed at bibliography.

dstillman

Oh, your question is about PDF annotations? Then yes, you add those to a note and use the Add Note button. That's not a workaround — that's the entire point of that feature.

Again, Quick Copy can produce formatted citations in any text field, but that has nothing to do with the word processor plugins, which have no way of knowing that text came from Zotero.

Niya.B

I would have preferred to skip the step 2 of creating a note. I'd like to just drag the annotation from the Zotero PDF directly on Word. As I said this comes with the correct citation and everything. Only thing missing is that the citation is not recognised as such.
Nevermind, maybe a thing to consider for Zotero developers.

dstillman

I can only say this so many times — the plugin can't detect citations if you just drag. It's not technically possible. It may become possible with some future changes to Word, but it's not something we can implement now. The fact that it shows the citation when you drag is irrelevant. That's just text, and it doesn't have the underlying metadata that links it reliably to the item in your Zotero library.

We'll likely add the ability to insert annotations directly via the plugin without needing to create a note first, but that, again, will be via the plugin, like all other plugin functionality.