How do I cure broken cites?

Anna Schwachula

Dear all,

I have several problems with a document(using zotero 3.0.2 on a Mac with Word 2008 and the corresponding Plugin). I identified the "broken" citations, removed them from first the text, and reinserted, then even removed them from the database, re-inserted them manually, but the problem(s) remain.

1. Whenever I insert an in-text citation of the following document, my bibliography entries lose their italics. If I remove the citation from the text and refresh, the bibliography font is ok again.

BMBF. 2008. Deutschlands Rolle in Der Globalen Wissensgesellschaft Stärken. Strategie Der Bundesregierung Zur Internationalisierung Von Wissenschaft Und Forschung. Strengthening Germany’s Role in the Global Knowledge Society. Strategy of the Federal Government for the Internationalization of Science and Research. Bonn, Berlin: BMBF.

2. Some in-text citations change font although the document preferences etc are set correctly. This mainly happens with the following cite:
(Sumner et al. 2009)/ Sumner, Andy, Nick Ishmael Perkins, and Johanna Lindstrom. 2009. Making Science of Influencing. Assessing the Impact of Development Research. IDS Working Papers 335. Brighton: IDS.

Something must be wrong here, but what is it? Sometimes the cites appear in the style set as preference, but after changing document preferences, they go back to Times New Roman. As said, I am aware that normally, citations appear in the style selected in document preferences. This is not the cause.

How can I find out what's wrong, debug the document? It is not only that it´s annoying to have wrong fonts in the text and bibliography, often the whole document won´t refresh anymore, bibliography doesn´t update etc.
Erasing and Re-inserting doesn´t help... so I appreciate any help!
What can this be, and is there any way of fixing the problem apart from not citing the document with Zotero? Is my library/ database the issue?

Thanks for comments and help! Cheers,
Anna

adamsmith

1. That's a Word bug - roughly speaking it's because of the long title in italics and the fact that this is the first item in the bibliography.
You can likely fix it by inserting a reference that is put before it in the bib.

2. "As said, I am aware that normally, citations appear in the style selected in document preferences. "
I'm pretty sure that's not actually the case - unless this has changed recently, they appear in the default style.

DWL-SDCA

See also thread 21778

It is a known problem that sometimes inserting objects or even performing a cut and paste of text from the same document in Word can cause the Word document style type to be affected. If you place your cursor within text before the problem you should see "default" in the Word style field. If you place your cursor within the problem I think that the Word document style type will have changed -- most likely to heading 3 or to one of the block quote styles. Word formatting styles can be set to automatically format small or large parts of a document. Usually this is a way to save time, keyboard use, and mouse clicks. When things go bad they can go very, very bad.

This can damage the Word document in other ways. I recall a complaint that inserting a graphic from a file caused the text after the insertion to be in small caps sans serif in a document that otherwise had been in Times.

Anna Schwachula

Dear Adam and dwl-sdca,

thank you for your quick help.

The trick of inserting a prior reference in the bibliography to get back the italics actually works - thanks!

Regarding the other issue: Sorry, I was wrong in what I wrote - I meant default settings not "preferences". I indeed use different formatting styles in my word document, all set to Arial 10, including the default format. But the citation appears in Times new roman.

@dwl-sdca: Unfortunately I get no results when searching for string 21778, could you give me a link to it?
And do you think that using different document formatting styles could be causing problems with zotero?

Thank you once again!

Gracile

@dwl-sdca: Unfortunately I get no results when searching for string 21778, could you give me a link to it?

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/21778

Anna Schwachula

Thanks, Gracile!

DWL-SDCA

Using different document styles is not the problem. I understand that this Word Mac problem is caused by Word doing bad things to its own background xml. Also, it shouldn't matter that you have altered the formatting of your default style. I've read that Word's confused format behavior is more prevalent among documents that have been exposed to track-changes --even if track-changes has been turned off.

I've had good luck returning to default style by highlighting the problem text and the previous paragraph then reselecting normal style.

Anna Schwachula

Dear DWL-SDCA,

thanks for your comment. I have used track-change in the document before, but turned it off when I read that this can cause problems. However, as some strange things happen in the document. In addition to the problems mentioned above, recently the quotations get totally mixed up. E.g. where previously I quoted from one source, now this citation is replaced with another source! This is scary, I now constantly am afraid of this happening and having to redo my entire work.

In addition, the table of contents disappears (created automatically through word using different styles in the text such as "heading 1" etc"). I also inserted a picture, which is reformated (text is now not starting under it, but is in the background of the picture). And all of a sudden with a citation on it - although I didn´t insert it there. I already checked, I didn´t use any citations in captures.

I still have one copy that works fine, but I am afraid it will happen in that document also, as in the others it started without prior warning.

Do you have any idea how to get the document back to normal/ prevent the still working one from messing up? You are probably right that the problem originates in Word, not in zotero, but as it affects Zotero, I hope that you have some idea of what to do...
Saving the doc with a different name doesn´t help, and I think copy-pasting contents in a new doc doesn´t either.

Thanks so much for your help!

Cheers,
Anna

fbennett

I'm not a Word expert, but have you accepted the changes? So long as the history of old changes is recorded in the document, there is a possibility that it could trip things up.

Anna Schwachula

Yes, all changes accepted and track-change turned off afterwards...

DWL-SDCA

Starting over may not be as bad as it seems. It may require less than a day. . . maybe much less.

I had a similar problem while working on my PhD thesis. I was using WinWord and Reference Manager. It got so bad that I saved the document as text files and prepared to start over and format the text properly while adding the references. Reference Manager stopped working completely. Fortunately, I had been compulsive about backing up -- I even saved to an RIS file. Then, my computer was stolen! That theft turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened. I replaced my ThinkPad with a MacBook, installed OpenOffice, and (at the insistance of a fellow student) tried out Zotero. Getting the 450 page document into OpenOffice with an RTF version was trivial. Zotero accepted the RIS file -- what didn't transfer from RM was not needed for my thesis. It required only an afternoon to get reference marks back into the fresh document using Zotero.

Anna Schwachula

I was somehow hoping that one of you expert guys would come up with an "easy" technical solution ;-) - but maybe you are right - sometimes good old "manual" work can be less time-intensive and less frustrating than continuing working with a somehow messed up document...
Thanks for all the help anyway!