Amending citation caused duplication (e.g., Smith2008a)

life1994

Hello,

I've received a manuscript back from my co-author and try to incorporate some new references that he suggested.

However, when I amended the citation by adding new reference articles into the place where the current citation is located at (e.g., (Smith2008) -> (Smith2008; Dolan et al. 2010)), it changes Smith2008 to Smith2008a.

Also, I'm seeing duplicated bibliography.

If anyone experience this issue, please help.

adamsmith

what exactly do you mean by "duplicated bibliography"?

life1994

Hi Adam,
Thanks for the prompt assistance.

This is what I meant (see below for the real example from my paper).

There was only one Hickok(2007) et al. However, after amending the citation part in the main text, I get Hickok(2007a) and Hickok (2007b).

Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007a). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(5), 393–402. http://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2113
Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007b). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(5), 393–402. http://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2113

adamsmith

For some reasons, there are two different versions of that article inserted in the paper. I can't tell you how exactly that happened--could be one from a group one from a personal library, could be that one is embedded in the document from an entirely different library, there are probably a couple of other ways. Also, if you or your co-author worked with an exported version of a library that'd have happened.

I don't think there's an alternative to going through the text and replace the duplicates: Insert that citation from your library and see if it turns into 2007a or 2007b.
Let's say it's 2007a. Then replace all instances of the 2007b version of that paper.

life1994

I've inserted that citation from my library and it turned into 2007a while the same paper in other part of the text turned into 2007b.

I've done other experiments as well and it seems that the only solution is to entirely remove these citations (which are quite a few) and re-insert it.

It seems like this is an existing problem in Zotero (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/30835/unwanted-duplicate-entries-in-the-bibliography-how-to-remove-them/)

adamsmith

it's not an existing problem with Zotero -- it's the result of user error.
In the thread you link to, e.g., it was using export/import to move libraries between computers.

life1994

Well, I don't know what I did wrong other than receiving the manuscript back from my co-author and try to amend the previous citation part...

Hope this issue will get fixed in the next version.

adamsmith

we can't fix something that we're not aware of as a bug. You're the only person reporting this among hundreds of thousands of Zotero users, so it's almost certainly something about your workflow.

If you're using Word, you can press alt+F9, pick one of those citations that are duplicate (in the text) and copy the whole field code for both of them here and we'll likely have a better guess of what happened.

life1994

Nothing seems to happen when I press alt + F9 in my word (I'm using mac and word 2011).

Can you explain how to copy the whole field code and what you mean by both of them?

Thanks,

adamsmith

That's odd (on Mac this would be Opt+F9), but you should be able to use

Go to Word Options. Click the "Advanced" tab and scroll down to the "Show document content" section. Right above the "Field shading" box, there is an option "Show field codes instead of their values." Check that.

via http://www.justanswer.com/mac-computers/7hl56-reason-word-mac-started-show-hyperlinks.html#ixzz3USsBQ6t6

And by "both" I mean the field code for a citation that comes out as Hickok(2007a) and for one that comes out as Hickok (2007b).

life1994

Hi Adam,
Many thanks for the prompt support.
For now, I resolved this issue by removing the field code and re-insert all citations from scratch due to the urgency of the paper.

I'll though get back to this issue when I get passed the busy time.

tboult

Just wanted to echo Adam's issues. I had many many many of these problems with a proposal I just finished. Did not have time to debug the issue or check codes. just hand edited the bib and the references. (much easier than deleting them.. search and selective replace for a) b) c) and a; b; and c; was bearable.

My issue also occured with many authors editing things, and a few MS word merges (some Mac some Windows) merges so maybe something there broke the codes, so the next addition of a reference though it needed a new one.

Anyhow just letting you know its not just Life'1944s problem.

A very useful feature would something that lets a user select 2 bib entries and say merge them .. (like you can in the main tool) and have it find and replace the 2 different labels with one consistent one. Then, no matter why it happened, it would be easy to fix.

adamsmith

I can see this with many people editing a document and inserting items from different libraries, sure. I don't know if there are going to be resources to invest into adding functionality to merge citations to the Word add-on in the foreseeable future. If you work with multiple people on the same document, some degree of care (ideally just everyone working from the same group) is likely going to remain necessary.

john_dunne

I am not sure if this discussion is still relevant, but in the current version (2021) duplicated bibliography entries in collaborative documents in Word are most commonly caused by adding citations from different sources. For example, some might come from a users "My library" and some might come from one or more groups that a user is a member of. Even though these entries may have identical data, Zotero will treat them as different. Additionally, if you are working with a collaborator and the collaborator has added an entry that you do not have in "My Library" or in a group that you are a member of, that entry will persist in the word document in the zotero-inserted field codes for that reference. If you then later create a shared group for the project and add the same reference from the shared group, you need to delete and re-add the earlier reference. Otherwise, the bibliography will have separate entries for the same, identical reference. There are two ways to identify references that are persisting in the document without pointing to a shared group. One is to attempt to edit the citation; at the bottom of the edit window a button should appear that says "Open in ". Alternatively, if you set field codes to visible in Word, the field codes will have the word "user" (plus a numerical ID) as opposed to "group" (again with a numerical ID) as the source of the reference.