Word bibliography duplicate entries and citations in bibliography that are not in Zotero library

Kayleigh02 · 2026-02-15T05:40:39+00:00

Hello! I'm am having an issue with Zotero inserting duplicate bibliography entries for the same article. For example, one source, Gray 2017, has two separate, identical entries in the bibliography, #90 and #106. However, #90 is not actually referenced anywhere in the paper, yet it still appears in the bibliography. To attempt to fix this, I deleted the (single) Gray 2017 entry in my Zotero library, and refreshed the bibliography, but it is still citing two entries for Gray 2017.

How do I avoid this duplication?

aborel · 2026-02-15T06:31:40+00:00

You shouldn't have deleted the items in your library, if it's a duplicate you should merge the identical items https://www.zotero.org/support/duplicate_detection
And if it is not a duplicate, deleting it will have no effect on your document - the reference information will still be somewhere in there.

To find the ghost reference in your document, you can switch to visible field codes https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes and search for the unnecessary item.