Literature review in Microsoft word with updating

elizabethamorg

Hi all, I am trying to make a running annotated bibliography note of my zotero library in Microsoft Word. I know you can select items and "create a bibliography from items" but is there a way to do that in word and it automatically updates without embedding a citation in text (i.e. I only want the bibliography without in-text citations). Looking at the documentation it seems you can just double-click the add/edit bibliography but when I try to do that I get the error "“You must insert a citation before performing this operation.” Thanks

dstillman

I'm not really sure what you mean here. The whole point of the word processor plugins is that the bibliography automatically updates from the citations in the document. If you don't insert citations, there's nothing to "automatically" update, and so simply generating a bibliography in the Zotero app is equivalent.

If what you're saying is that you want a bibliography that automatically updates with every single item in your Zotero library, then no, that's not functionality that exists, or ever would — we'd never build a feature that assumed that you wanted to cite every item in your library.