Identifying references, which "Citations" are no longer updated in retrospect.

Daniel26

Hi,

I have the following problem. I have a Word document which was altered by many different people. When I now want to "Zotero Refresh" the document I receive following message.

"You have modified this citation since Zotero generated it. Do you want to keep your modifications and prevent future updates? Clicking "Yes" will prevent Zotero from updating this citation if you add additional citations, switch styles, or modify the item to which it refers. Clicking "No" will erase your changes"

Clicking "No" leads to a Word doc. which still updates the changes that I undertake within my Zotero library in Firefox.
Clicking "Yes" leads to a Word doc. in which "Citations" aren't updated any more, after altering my Zotero library.
Example for clicking "Yes":
Citations before change:
(Jaeger et al.) -- changes in the Firefox library Jaeger --> Jäger
-- Zotero refresh (in Word) -- Citation in Word still says Jaeger et all, bibliography in Word says Jäger.

My question is this:
Is there a possibility within Zotero to show (or highlight) all citations that can not be changed any more? In other words, the citations references that where responded by "Yes" afterwards?

And what could have happened that this message appeared in the first place.

Thanks so much in advance...
Daniel

adamsmith

Is there a possibility within Zotero to show (or highlight) all citations that can not be changed any more? In other words, the citations references that where responded by "Yes" afterwards?

no, not really. If you show field codes (alt+F9) I believe the field codes contain a flag - something like "CUSTOM" or so - but that's not very convenient.

And what could have happened that this message appeared in the first place.

manually editing citations either directly in Word or in the "Show Editor" button of the classic insert citation dialog

sarahcrooks1

I think my problem may be similar to yours. When trying to insert a new citation I get the same error message but clicking either yes or no makes no difference - Zotero just highlights the next citation in the document and produces the same error message - over and over again. I can't get rid of the error message and it appears on screen regardless of what programme I'm running. So it is on screen if I am looking at my emails, or Youtube, etc, etc. It won't let me close Word either so I have to force a shutdown. I have tried shutting down my computer completely - several times - with no luck. I am not at all techie-minded so some simple advice would be appreciated, as I am in the middle of writing my PhD thesis. Thank you.

adamsmith

You should just go through the entire document once clicking "No" for every reference and this should stop. Make sure you have the most recent version of Firefox and the Word plugin.
I can't tell you exactly what happened without more details, but see my answer above.

tedo

I have the same error when I wanted to include one reference:

"You have modified this citation since Zotero generated it. Do you want to keep your modifications and prevent future updates?
Clicking "Yes" will prevent Zotero from updating this citation if you add additional citations, switch styles, or modify the item to which it refers. Clicking "No" will erase your changes."

I checked EVERY reference and make sure that all of them are present in Zotero "database". After all that job, the error stays and I can't do anything about it.

I cannot rely on Zotero any more!
Libreoffice Writer 5.2.4.2 @ Debian stable.

Can someone, please, help me? I'm writing PhD thesis and it's very frustrating, annoying and make me helpless.

bwiernik

That message is indicating that you manually edited the citation text in LibreOffice after inserting it using Zotero (e.g., to add a page number, prefix, or modify an author's name). You should always make changes to item metadata directly in Zotero or add page numbers/prefixes/suffixes using the Zotero Insert Citation dialog, rather than manually changing the text in LibreOffice:
https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage

For your current document, if you choose "No", it will erase your manually made changes to the citation. You should figure out which citation it is referring to and then re-insert those changes using the Zotero dialog instead.

tedo

I've NEVER manually edited citation text. I ALWAYS make changes directly in Zotero and ALWAYS using Zotero Insert Citation dialog!

tedo

Now I'm forced to go through 59 pages and reconstrusted all 88 references on more than 100 places, loosing info about pages where there was something cited and loosing two-three days just for it. And that is the second time in a year!
Zotero should be helping not breaking!
I found that Zotero is being confused by multiple sources - it can't update them properly.

bwiernik

This is certainly not a general problem. I promise you--I just finished writing an 800 thesis using Zotero with many multi-source citations and did encounter this problem. Please remember that I am trying to help. I understand that you are frustrated, but shouting is not going to help.

It sounds like you may have accidentally typed in a citation or else LibreOffice automatically made some change (e.g., maybe a spell check changed a word spelling or sometimes LibreOffice's track changes/commenting feature doesn't play nicely with other feature like Reference Marks/Bookmarks).

In any event, if you don't recall making a change, you can probably safely just click "No" on the error message and let Zotero revert whatever change it was. Otherwise, try to split your document into chapters and identify which citation is throwing the error and replace that one. Splitting the document into chapters will also help to keep it running smoothly as you insert more and more citations in a longer document.

tedo

Thank You bwiernik for trying to help. Exclamation mark wasn't meant to be shouting but frustrating, but it can also be understood as such - I'm sorry if so.
Yes, I'm quite frustrated. No, it's not my fault. Yes, I often recommend Zotero to my students and colleagues and now came to this horrible situation second time after while.

bwiernik

Like I said, if you don't recall making any manual changes, just click "No" to make the error go away and revert to Zotero automatically updating your references.

tedo

The error does go away but come back as sun as I try to add new reference.

tedo

So, I can't add a new reference.

adamsmith

Could you describe exactly step-by-step what's going on?
You click insert reference -- then what?

tedo

I managed to fix problem. A reference in the multiple references disappeared from the Zotero database. Now is bothering me: how could this happen? There should be some kind of referential integrity, where Zotero should alert the user that it intends to delete the reference to be used within a document?

tedo

In addition, I do not remember that I have deleted the missing reference ...

tedo

@adamsmith I click insert reference and after a second or two, the two errors came (I have screenshoots).
http://pasteboard.co/rfUpdNppV.png
http://pasteboard.co/rfV1bPPPe.png

adamsmith

OK, then you click No -- what happens next?

tedo

Then You see second error and nothing - there is no new reference.

adamsmith

Right -- but have you gone through all the errors pressing "no" at least once?

tedo

No, not even once.

adamsmith

OK, that's what you'd want to do. I can't tell you what's causing this -- my guess would be some global formatting change that somehow included the citations so Zotero thinks they've been modified -- but my expectation would be that if you just go through the document once and tell Zotero to not keep the modifications, you should be fine.

tedo

Now it's fine, I guess - it's hard to tell. I found few references with wrong numbers because of this error - pointing to reference +1.

danclegg

@Daniel26 update, I found a solution on Linux for this at:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/343904#Comment_343904