Refresh duplicates citation in LibreOffice

edited 6 days ago
Hello, I'm having an issue with the Zotero plugin on LibreOffice (on Windows 11): when I click on "Refresh", sometimes a reference in a footnote gets duplicated like this:

74 P.A.L. Hill, The Harklean version of St. Luke 1-11. A critical introduction and edition (Diss. University of Melbourne; Melbourne 2002), as described in https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/f011c243-6b68-5cbf-9b0c-890e6231b8eb (accessed on May 28, 2026).

P.A.L. Hill, The Harklean version of St. Luke 1-11. A critical introduction and edition (Diss. University of Melbourne; Melbourne 2002), as described in https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/f011c243-6b68-5cbf-9b0c-890e6231b8eb (accessed on May 28, 2026).

Specifically, the gray background tells me that the second instance is still managed by Zotero, while the first looks like "plain text" (it also lacks small caps and italics). And there is an empty paragraph between the two instances.

To clarify my example, the part that reads ", as described in https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/f011c243-6b68-5cbf-9b0c-890e6231b8eb (accessed on May 28, 2026)" was obtained through the suffix function in Zotero... may this affect that behavior? However, such a duplication already happened to me some days ago, though I do not remember which citation it was.

Is this a known issue?

Thank you!
  • What version of LibreOffice are you running? Does this occur with the current stable LibreOffice version?
  • edited today at 9:26am
    I am running LibreOffice 26.2.4, the last stable version.

    I've tried several times to replicate the problem to catch it in a screen recording. It has in fact occurred again a couple of times, but not always, and not always in the same footnote; sometimes it is just an empty paragraph that gets added before the reference rather than a duplication of the reference. I've started five screen recordings, none of which has managed to catch this undesired behavior!

    I see that someone already reported the same problem in 2022: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/98335/libreoffice-zotero-duplicates-references-within-same-footonote

    The troubleshooting instructions (https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents) recommend isolating the problematic citations, but my guess is that it is precisely the presence of multiple citations that triggers the problem.

    What I have been able to catch (because it happens much more consistently) is the annoying "flickering" effect when footnotes are updated on LibreOffice (this, if I remember correctly, did not happen when I used Microsoft Word). Here is the video: https://youtu.be/a5C45-7RS6c (I've used placeholder text in place of my research). If you do not want to watch the whole four minutes, the section from 3:25 to 3:45 gives an idea of the flickering I am talking about. Also, the fact that it takes almost 20 seconds to update 76 footnotes may itself signal a problem. Might this "flickering" correlate with the duplications and added empty paragraphs?
  • The "flickering" is normal in the sense that this is how insertions of citations works, but it's usually so fast it's barely visible. What version of Java are you running? Does it help if you update it, and make sure you select the updated version in LibreOffice?
  • I was running Java 21.0.4. I've now tried both 25.0.3 (latest long-term-support release) and 26.0.1 (latest release), neither of which has helped; the "flickering" is still very visible. What else could be slowing down the plugin's work?

    Thank you for your assistance!
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