Importing into new Document

Jane Durham

I am working on a peice of research and have imported some previous writing, which was referenced using Zotero, for some reason Zotero does not recognise the old references and asks me to update, which I do, but it then states that it cannot link to the file, and it is not possible to add any new references as each time I do I have to go back over the old ones, refind them and Zotero gets stuck, advice welcomed

adamsmith

please provide the exact messages you receive and no paraphrasing - I have a hard time following what's going on.
Also, what exactly do you mean by "importing"?

Jane Durham

Hello

I copied and pasted part of an old document into one I'm currently working on, and when I then tried to continue working it came up with the following error message:
this Item no longer exists in your Zotero database, do you want to select a substitute item, with a warning that clickning no will delete from the bibliography

I select yes, go into the database & select the identical item to the one that is already quoted, and it then goes onto the next reference, until after doing several of these (each time I open the document I have to go through the process) I then get another message, 'Zotero experienced an error updating your document, object has been deleted, but I can't find which object has been deleted & my data base has grown but I've not removed anything from it

I hope this helps you & look forward to some advice, it will be a disappointment if references are not transferable through cut & paste since as a researcher I do advance wrting and then use that in later work

Thank you
Jane

ajlyon

Before pasting into a new document, you need to insert a single citation using the Zotero plugin, otherwise Zotero can't recognize the citations.

Jane Durham

Do I need to insert into the old document or the new one?

what is the Zotero plug in? do you mean the usual add ons that are in word, or something else?

thank you

Jane

adamsmith

The Zotero plugin is the tool that allows you to insert Zotero references in Word/Ooo.

What I think might be happening is that you first need to upgrade the old document - so try to insert a new citation there and see what happens. Also, how old are we talking about? Do you happen to remember with (roughly) what Zotero version it was created.

Just to be clear - generally it is no problem to cut&paste Zotero references.

Jane Durham

Thank you, the orriginal document was created using Zotero 1, returning to it, Zotero says that it needs to be upgraded, so I'll know for next time

Thank you for your help

Jane

adamsmith

so it is working now? Great.