Not switching correctly from footnotes to in-text citations

rcullum

I'm currently trying to switch the citation style in a Word document from footnotes to in-text (APSA) using the Document Preferences pop-up in Word's Zotero tab. Unfortunately, it only half-does it: in some cases it fully converts the citation, but in others the document retains the footnote but reformats the citation to an APSA standard *in* the footnote (see attached image link below for an example).

I'm thinking it may have something to do with the fact that I've manually added text to some of the footnotes. Any advice appreciated.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u13683510/ophof81sw473rowq9hkq.jpg

adomasven

Yes, if you have manually edited your citations and when prompted by Zotero chose to keep those modifications, then Zotero will not convert them for you. To re-enable Zotero management of those citations, you should put your cursor in them and press Add/Edit Citation in the Zotero tab.

If you have already changed the citation style in your document, Zotero won't convert these existing edited citations to be displayed in-text. To convert them to in-text you can change the style back and forth again.

rcullum

Ok great, thanks for the swift response!

NothackerMax

I have the same issue. I did NOT manually edit the citations. I never touched the darkish grey cells that appear when clicking on a zotero created footnote.

Still, when I change from Chicago (full note) to Chicago (author-date), the author-date citations are "stuck" in the footnotes.

Help! Why is that?

NothackerMax

Update: I later discovered that I edited 3 of ~90 citations slightly. Having these 3 edited prevented all the other 87 from being properly reformatted.

This could not be fixed in word. I had to manually redo the citations.

The long-term solution is: Switch to a LaTeX editor of choice.

adomasven

The solution is to not manually edit Zotero citations. If the citation is wrong, you should either modify the item metadata in Zotero to fix it, or if it's a citation style issue, choose a different citation style or modify your current citation style.

I'm not sure LaTeX will even allow you to modify citation output, and if it does, you will surely have similar issues. This is not a matter of the software (Zotero) doing the wrong thing, but rather, if the user manually edited a citation, the software respects those edits and does not revert/erase them.