Zotero Word plugin not playing nice with Table of Contents feature.

edited March 18, 2024
I am using Microsoft Word's Table of Contents feature (References > Table of Contents) to keep an updated table of contents based on my documents' Heading styles. I use Zotero's Word plugin to manage my References list, so the last entry in the Table of Contents generated by Word's tool should be the word References and the page number the references begin on. However, whenever I go to update the Table of Contents, it brings the entire bibliography into the Table of Contents.

The References section has References in Heading 1 style, and then a line break, then the actual citations begin. I have tried to enter an additional line break, and I have also manually entered a continuous section break between the word References and the beginning of the citations, and in any case I have tried, if I go back to the table of contents and choose Update Table, it adds all the references themselves into the ToC.

I have also tried not using the built-in Header 1 style and instead just highlighting the word References and using Alt+Shift+O to create a table of contents item for it, but that results in the same issue.

Has anyone figured out how to handle Zotero plugin references with Word's Table of Contents feature?

EDITED TO ADD: Playing around more, I have figured out that the issue seems to be that Zotero's created bibliography generates with a Style other than default/normal, and so each citation is giving itself an entry in the table of contents. I figured this out by realizing I can click on one of the citations and convert it to Normal style and then it no longer appears when I update the table. However, I certainly don't want to go back and manually format all of these references to Normal and then to the right formatting, NOT doing that is a major reason of using Zotero! So if someone knows of a way to fix it, please let me know, just wanted to provide this extra bit of info for troubleshooting purposes.
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