Zotero add-in for Mac struggles with special characters in citations

pritup

I have now gone through all of the troubleshooting steps and fixed the error once by deleting my whole bibliography, but it appeared again and it seems that the issue are now citations with e.g. umlauts or other special characters (e.g. in German names). Other citations are added normally, but special character citations give me an error. I have the most recent versions of both Word and Zotero, what to do?

dstillman

Is there some context for this question? I'm not seeing any previous posts from you.

Can you back up and explain exactly what the problem is, provide a Report ID after it occurs, say what exact Word version this is, etc.?

pritup

Thanks for your message and sorry for the brevity, here is a bit more context.

I suddenly started receiving this error when adding in-text citations: "Zotero experienced an error updating your document. Would you like to view troubleshooting instructions?"

When I clicked Yes, I was directed to this page: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents

I did everything mentioned in the list: checking for updates, copying the text into a new document etc. The problem was resolved after I removed the bibliography from the document. Then I noticed that the problem came back and that it might actually be caused by the special characters in the authors' names, because I can add references without special characters without problem, but the issue persists for two specific articles in my collection:

Schäfer, M. S., Füchslin, T., Metag, J., Kristiansen, S., & Rauchfleisch, A. (2018). The different audiences of science communication: A segmentation analysis of the Swiss population’s perceptions of science and their information and media use patterns. Public Understanding of Science, 27(7), 836–856. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662517752886

Schrögel, P., Humm, Christian, Leßmöllmann, Annette, Kremer, Bastian, Adler, Jona, & Weißkopf, Markus. (2018). Nicht erreichte Zielgruppen in der Wissenschaftskommunikation: Literatur-Review zu Exklusionsfaktoren und Analyse von Fallbeispielen (pp. 1–87). https://www.wmk.itz.kit.edu/downloads/Zwischenbericht_Wissenschaft_fuer_alle.pdf

I am using Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (23C71), Word for Mac (Version 16.85.2 (24052614), and Zotero (6.0.37) with plug-in for Word.

dstillman

Probably won't make a difference, but you'd want to start by updating to the current version of Sonoma — you're five months behind.

Beyond that, we'd still need a Report ID after reproducing this.

I can't reproduce this with 14.5/16.85.2/6.0.37 with APA 7th with those two items (saved now from the DOI page and PDF metadata retrieval, respectively).

pritup

Thanks, I'll try to update today when I have the chance. Here is the report ID: 317540441.

pritup

Well, the unlikely happened and the Sonoma update seemed to fix this issue! Thanks for the tip!