Trouble inserting citations and recreating a bibliography.

jfagan11

I am preparing a paper and inserted 40 citations. I then discovered that several of the citations were not formatting correctly. I tried doing a few piecemeal but it was a disaster of problems. So I deleted all citations and the bibliography, and adjusted the formatting of all citations and I shut down Zotero and word. Then I opened them and started inserting citations again and tried to recreate the bibliography. But it seems that Zotero remembered the old bibliography and told me that accepting the revised citations would prevent any further updating of the bibliography. So my question is is there a way to erase all citations and erase all memory of citations and bibliography and then begin again with a new bibliography and citations?

adamsmith

You can use "unlink citations" in the Zotero add-on -- after that, the file is just a Word file with no link at all to Zotero.
If you run into problems again, please come here to ask for help first -- all of this was probably unnecessary (and, I'd guess, has a good chance of happening again: there's no reason to expect you wouldn't see the same problems again; computers are nothing if not consistent...)

jfagan11

Thanks for that info, Adam. In future, I will use the unlink command. Lacking that knowledge, my laborious solution was to save the document as a .txt doc, that eliminated the Zotero stuff. Then I rebuilt the citations and bibliography. Took me 2 hours. Next time I will be more careful. The basic problem was that I thought I could correct the format of a citation by just correcting the citation in Zotero and then refreshing the document. That does not work. I think that Zotero sees that as the same as going in and editing the citation in my bibliography within the document. Or maybe it confuses Zotero in some other way. But anyway, rebuilding, as I did worked.

jfagan11

Adam, if you have any more insights, based on what I said in my earlier comment, please let me know. I do need to use Zotero for other papers as well as for this one. Thanks!

damnation

Also, instead of manually editing citations/bibliography, a given citation style can be changed or edited. Zotero+CSL is meant to reduce the work for you, not get you so frustrated that you just give up. ;)
And the beautiful thing about Zotero is that the community+devs are here to help and usually very responsive as you've seen with this thread. Don't hesitate to reach out first.

jfagan11

I am exposing my ignorance here... What is Zotero+CSL?
Thanks

damnation

Zotero, the software you're using.
CSL, Citation Style Language, the system used for Citation styles that also is utilised by Zotero.

jfagan11

Thanks!
BTW, is there a simple way to get URLs and DOIs included in the citations? for some journals they are optional and I would like to be able to include them.

damnation

Yes, by editing the citation style.
1. We have more than 10,000 styles on the repository, so, likely, the journal of choice is already there: https://www.zotero.org/styles
2. If not, you can request a style following this guide: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/REQUESTING.md#requesting-csl-styles

jfagan11

Thank you!!