In-text citations not updated when refereshing to a new style

tuo33679

When the referesh completes, only the bibliography is using the new APA (without &) but not the in text citations. For example, Jones & Mayer (2020) should be Jones and Mayer (2020) and in the debug log, it seems like it is doing that. But in the document it is not. How can I fix this...it is a 400 page document and going back one by one is do feasible as it takes nearly 10 minutes for each citation to update.

dstillman

When you use narrative citations ("Omit Author"), you currently have to type the part outside the parentheses yourself, so no, Zotero of course can't update that. Making it possible for Zotero to insert and update both parts is planned, but that functionality isn't yet available.

So this doesn't make sense:

it is a 400 page document and going back one by one is do feasible as it takes nearly 10 minutes for each citation to update

Again, these aren't actually Zotero citations — it's just plain text that you typed — so there wouldn't be anything to wait for. You just have to fix the text. (Make sure you don't edit anything within the parentheses, though. That's managed by Zotero.)

That aside, though, if it's taking 10 minutes for each citation to update, make sure you have "Automatically update citations" disabled in the plugin's Document Preferences window.

tuo33679

Thank you for the response. I should have clarified that I did not use the Omit Author feature. I let Zotero add the citation as normal then moved around the () to match intext citation format. I wanted to avoid mispelling an author's name, or missing an update if I found the author uses a hyphen or has a longer surname than what came through in the RIS or BIB download.

I saw in other forums the suggestion to disable auto update but since this is sort of final round, I hesitate to do that now.

It's odd as it seems to have udpated most of them but not all of them and I can't really tie it to older vs newer citations or citation in a paragraph vs citation in a literature table. The bibliography, however, seems to have incorporated the style change with no issues. Any thoughts on this or how I could speed up the final updates from "&" to "and" for citations in the document?

dstillman

I let Zotero add the citation as normal then moved around the () to match intext citation format.

OK, you don't want to do that — that means you edited each citation manually, and Zotero would've asked you whether you want to keep your edits and prevent further updates or revert them. Since you chose to keep the edits, you'll need to edit them manually going forward. (Or you could click each one, click Add/Edit Citation, and say to revert them when prompted, but you'd then still have to type each author using Omit Author.)

In the future, you'll want to use Omit Author and avoid editing citations directly in the document. See Customizing Cites.