Finding source of broken BibTEX entry

EoinTravers

Hi,
I'm working with Zotero, pandoc, and bibtex, and I was trying to generate a draft of a paper, using the `pandoc-citeproc` feature to process references, when I hit this problem.

It turns out that when I export my Zotero library to a .bib file,
it one of the entries looks is this:

@incollection{__????
}

and this causes pandoc to crash.

Obviously, I can just delete this entry, and everything works as it should (until I export the library again), but what I would like is to be able to locate the broken reference in Zotero, so that I can modify/delete it.

Does anyone know anything about this?

adamsmith

I don't think there's a super-easy way to find this, but it's a book section, so that should reduce things quite a bit.
So sort by item type in the central panel and export all book sections. If you've got only a few you'll be able to sport the problem. Otherwise divide them in two, and export both halves individually, see where the broken item is and continue until you have a culprit. Even with 1000 book chapters in your library that'll only take a couple of exports

adamsmith

Oh, and please export the item to Zotero RDF before deleting it so we can take a look. Obviously this shouldn't happen.

EoinTravers

That's clever, thanks.

The culprit was, as you said, a completely blank book section entry.
Most likely, I, at some point in the last few days, clicked

File -> New Item -> Book Section

and didn't modify the entry. D'oh!

Thanks!

Eoin