Zotero permanently deleted some work

GeologyJoe999 · December 13, 2023

I have been using the program for years without issue but today I attempted to add a citation to some work. The citation then proceeded to corrupt the paragraphs below it, and when I went to undo this, it deleted the citation and all 500 words along with it, that I cannot restore. They aren't anywhere in the version history, cant be recovered with the undo/redo tool, its a couple hours work just gone - deadlines coming up fast as well so this has completely fucked me over

dstillman · December 13, 2023

Hard to say what happened, but nothing is saved until you actually save the document. Unless you're saying this was new content that you had just typed, you could just close the document without saving and reopen it.

What do you mean by "proceeded to corrupt the paragraphs below it"?

Zotero just inserts standard Word fields at the cursor location and doesn't touch other content in the document. If you had accidentally typed a lot of text into a citation — i.e., into the Word field — then that could result in the content being lost, though Zotero would tell you that a citation had been edited and ask if you wanted to keep your edits. You should make sure that you have field shading enabled in Word (as it is by default), which will cause Zotero citations to be highlighted in gray, so that you can see where the fields start and end.