Citations Unlinked in Google Docs

quincraig

Hi there,

I've been working for days to investigate but I can't find the cause. I'm on google docs writing a book with 90 citations. I tried to insert my bibliography 2 days ago and half the citations became unlinked. I did previous versions and they still become unlinked when I try to insert my bibliography. I tried to relink the citations by hand but they immediately become unlinked again! I have no idea what to do from here. I have no other plug ins, and I'm using Chrome. Zotero is updated on my Mac.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

adomasven

If you revert to an older version of the document and citations are unlinked, you need to try an even older version.

If you can reproduce some sort of bug (like citations unlinking, or relinked citations unlinking) in a small snippet of a single page, we can take a look. Otherwise see https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/google_docs_citations_unlinked

quincraig

I went back to older versions all the way to where I could insert a bibliography and the bibliography that did successfully insert was incomplete. It only had a 3rd of the citations I used in my book. Then I noticed the footnotes were changed and incorrect which confused me because it had no error message and noticed this myself.

adomasven

You will have to troubleshoot this yourself further. At some point something happened to your document that unlinked those citations and there is no automatic way to figure it out or revert it. You will have to manually go through older versions until you find one that isn't broken or reinsert all citations manually.

If citations are unlinking after you relink them, please produce a small snippet (no longer than a few pages) copy of the document where that is reproducible and send it to support@zotero.org.

quincraig

Okay I fixed it and this is how:

First I uninstalled and reinstalled Zotero on my Mac.

Then I relinked each unlinked citation one at a time, and noticed there was one citation in particular that just wouldn't properly link no matter how many times I relinked it. So I deleted that part of my book, just to see what would happen. Once I deleted the problem citation, and I relinked each citation one by one, I was able to add a bibliography! Success at last.

However, I was still only getting 1/4th of the citations I had in my book, in my bibliography. So I began troubleshooting this. I don't know what happened, as I tried adding the missing citations to the bibliography in the zotero app, but it wouldn't add them and gave me no reason why or error message, nada. But I had copied and pasted my entire document onto a new document, which caused all citations to go red and unlink in the new document (on google docs.)

I went back to my original document to see my bibliography and suddenly all 100% of my citations appeared. I don't know what caused it to automatically fix, I'm just grateful it did.