Can't Insert Citation-Zotero asks to modify all my citations

ttulcin

Since the lastest update, I am having trouble inserting citations. When I try to insert, I get the message from Zotero saying that I have modified this citation, and asks for yes and no. It takes me back to the beginning of my document (MS Word for Mac 2011, OSX Yosemite 10.10.4), and attempts to modify ALL of my citations. I have to force quit to get out. This is very troubling, as I cannot, cannot, cannot, I repeat, CANNOT, have my cites jumbled in my dissertation. I even attempted to rename the document in the event it had become corrupted. It did not help. This has happened on occasion, but not to this extent. It appears to me that Zotero is not for the MAC user. Please advise.

DWL-SDCA

Zotero is well-used by thousands of Mac owners. There are ways to fix your problem. Take a step back and let the experts here help sort this out. Displays of high emotional frustration, although common among thesis writers, only get in the way of getting help.

What version of Zotero are you using? What version of the plugin? What style? Others here will have additional questions but answer these essential ones first.

aurimas

Besides what DWL-SDCA asks above...

I get the message from Zotero saying that I have modified this citation

Have you modified the citations manually? (i.e. you edited them in the document after they were inserted)

This is very troubling, as I cannot, cannot, cannot, I repeat, CANNOT, have my cites jumbled in my dissertation.

So if you do allow Zotero to replace your "modified" citations (in a copy of your document. KEEP BACKUPS!), what happens? Does it actually jumble them up?

ttulcin

I keep backups. Don't have time for Zotero shenanigans. Will edit chapter by hand and change ref manager going forward.

ttulcin

I did edit them manually. I am using the latest version of Zotero. I cite very liberally, and do not have the time or the inclination to go back and chnage my manual changes. Technology should save time, not waste it.

aurimas

Well, if you don't want Zotero to change your manual edits, then you just have to tell Zotero to not do so at the prompt. That's why that prompt is there. There's nothing that Zotero can magically do for manually edited citations. When you tell Zotero to not update the manually edited citation once, it should not prompt you again (for that citation). If that's not what you're seeing, there might be something we can fix.

ttulcin

That's OK, but why does Zotero go back, MONTHS later, to ask about citations that were NOT manually edited, and then proceed to go through EVERY citation separately, FROM PAGE 1 OF THE DOCUMENT? I have MANY, MANY references. Is there a way to fix this?

adamsmith

so you're saying it's asking about citations that you never edited manually?
The reason it would ask later is if it wants to auto-update the citation for one reason or the other (changed citation style, changed data in Zotero or something of the type).

We understand you're frustrated, but please try to focus on describing your problem as precisely as possible.

ttulcin

When I add an entirely new entry, its fine. But when I cite to a previously cited one, every 2nd cite or so, I get the "request for modification" message, going back to page 1, footnote 1, and asking this question of every single citation, making some changes along the way. These include many in which I have made NO manual change. I have no way at this point of going back, as I have 120 footnotes, with text, in 39 pages of document so far. As you can see, I footnote extensively, and cannot have Zotero act in this way--it is beyond "frustrating." I am using the latest zotero and plug-in for word for mac 2011 and the latest OSX (Yosemite 10.10.4). Indeed, while I have experienced this crazy behavior in the past on odd occasions, I now experience almost every time since your latest update. Obviously, there is something VERY wrong here that requires attention.

ttulcin

And in response to your post, there have been NO changes made to the citations covered by the Zotero message. To continue my workflow without screwing up my notes, I can only add in new entries (to maintain the running bibliography) and unfortunately type the repeated cites by hand. For this, I did not sign up for Zotero.

ttulcin

I will also be sure to warn my graduate student colleagues to avoid using Zotero until this mess is resolved.

fbennett

ttulcin: Can you post a sample citation here that you have not edited manually, but that is issuing a "request for modification" notice? The plain text form will do, no need to replicate the formatting.

adamsmith

Also, as a thought, are you tracking changes in the document in Word? Shouldn't make a difference, but it might.

jgentzke

This very same thing is happening to me as well. Exactly as ttulcin describes. And it has been become quite frequent since I've switched from a PC to a Mac. This is a serious issue and until it is resolved I too will will do my best to warn others against using Zotero on any serious projects.

fbennett

Can you post a sample citation here that you have not edited manually, but that is issuing a "request for modification" notice? The plain text form will do, no need to replicate the formatting.

There is a reason behind the request. Zotero embeds the "plain" (unformatted) version of a cite in the document, and compares the generated "plain" reference with it. For some character sets, there are multiple ways of representing characters in Unicode. This creates problems for search, and Zotero recently moved to normalize the encoding of such characters. I am thinking that there is a possibility that a discrepancy between the encoding of the "plain" version of a cite embedded in the document, and that of the generated "plain" version of the cite might cause this behaviour. That intuition might be wrong—the purpose of the question above is to gauge whether it is worth pursuing.

aurimas

That intuition might be wrong—the purpose of the question above is to gauge whether it is worth pursuing

That bug would be worth fixing regardless. This may also be happening if the user was previously using a different bibliography locale. Though it would be more obvious in that case.

aurimas

@fbennett

Zotero embeds the "plain" (unformatted) version of a cite in the document, and compares the generated "plain" reference with it

Looking at Zotero code, it doesn't seem like that's what it's doing. My understanding is that before it attempts to re-generate the citation, it compares the text that is visible in Word to the text that Zotero stored previously when it generated the citation last time. So this would not be affected by any changes in Zotero citation generation, but only by edits in the actual citation.

aurimas

@jgentzke and @ttulcin

If you're willing to spend some time debugging this and you're using Zotero in Firefox, please install Zotero Beta and submit a Debug log covering one such erroneous message from Zotero.

dstillman

And ttulcin and jgentzke, please skip the melodramatic threats when posting here. People are here volunteering their time to help you because they'd like to address your issue — which obviously most Zotero users aren't experiencing, or else the forums would be flooded with complaints — so just focus on the problem you're facing and work with them to debug it.

https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines#etiquette

fbennett

@aurimas: Ah, right, the strings compared are the visible plain-text content of field, before and after the change. I'm still curious, though, whether Word does composition/decomposition normalization, and if not, whether characters that differ in their normalization form will compare as equal.

cjanzen

I am having the same problem as @jgentzke and @ttulcin. Was this resolved at all because I am getting the same prompt and regardless of whether I click yes or no, Zotero modifies my citations. They do not look different in My Library so I cannot go back and modify them but when I go to insert them they will appear differently [ex: Instead of (Ettinger 2006, 45) Zotero will insert (B.L. Ettinger 2006- I do not want the B.L.).

Is there a way to reverse or edit this for all of them instead of having to change them every time I insert a citation in Word?

Thanks for your time.

adamsmith

cjanzen -- we didn't solve their problem becuase they stopped responding and there is no general issue we're aware of (e.g. you're afaik the first person to post something related since last summer).

In your case, the simplest would seem to fix the underlying issue with in-text citations, which has nothing to do with the rest of this thread and is almost certainly: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation

gsthellman

I have also experienced something similar. I use Zotero stand-alone for Mac. Yesterday I went back to a large, completed document to modify it. Whenever I attempt to add a new Zotero citation or edit an existing one, Zotero prompts me with the dialogue box asking if I want to keep my modifications of a citation. But it asks me this regarding a citation box that does not contain the same work that I was trying to add. After answering (either yes or no), it goes to the next citation, and keeps repeating this process for some time (whether the answer is yes or no) until it finally stops somewhere well into the document and the following error box appears:

Zotero experienced an error updating your document.

Document modified during update @[setCode:field.m:585]

This is not occurring with other previous documents I have used Zotero with, and did not happen with this one either when I originally composed it. Usually, when I add a citation of a particular work that I had already cited elsewhere in the document and added annotations, the dialogue box would only appear for citations that included the particular work that I was now adding or editing. That was easy enough to manage as I could copy/past my annotations and then tell Zotero to erase them so that my citation would be updated in the future and then paste the annotations back in. But now, I have to decide answer yes or no to 20-30 or more citations before the error box appears, and this repeats every time I add or edit a citation in the document without in the end allowing me to add the citation I was originally trying to add. This effectively means that I cannot modify this document at all. I have tried on previously saved files of the same document and the same problem occurs. I would appreciate any help since otherwise I will have to re-enter everything in a new file. Thanks.

adamsmith

So just to be clear when you're supposed to get that message:
It should appear when you have manually modified a citation in Word and then perform any action that would affect that citation (including a general refresh of citations which may be triggered by inserting a new citation).

That means the fact that it's highlighting old citations isn't at all surprising but by design.

The question is why you're getting that message for a massive amount of citations. Is there anything you can think of that you did in that document that could have triggered this? Most obviously, did you actually modify those citations in Word (like move parentheses or something of the type)? If not, any other ideas of anything you did that Zotero could interpret like a manual modification (like a font or formatting change)? Those latter ones shouldn't matter, but it's certainly possibel that they do under some conditions.

BUProf

Hello, I am having the same problem with the "modified citations" message coming up with some (not all) citations that I try to insert in a document, and then nothing happens when I click either Yes or No. I have to force-quit in the Task Manager and restart Zotero each time before I can insert a different citation.

There is nothing different about the citations that give me this message and the ones that do not.

I did just re-set the Doc Prefs for this document a few days ago, changing it from Chicago style to Vancouver. I have never had this problem in Harvard or Chicago styles.

I use Zotero Standalone for Firefox, have the latest version, and am using it on a Word Doc on a PC.

Any advice on how to make this stop would be much appreciated! I am updating references on the final version of an article manuscript due to the publisher by Sunday, and this is driving me nuts...

THANKS!

adamsmith

are you working with track changes?

BUProf

Yes, not in the citations specifically but elsewhere in the document -- but I always do in drafts, and it has never caused a problem with other citation formats in Zotero.

adamsmith

Make a copy of the document, try accepting all changes there, see if Zotero works correctly afterwards.

BUProf

Thank you! That helped. Still happens some, but not as much.

adamsmith

My guess would be the problem was that track changes was active during the switch of citation styles. It's supposed to de-activate itself, I thought, but if that doesn't happen you get the track change markers inside Zotero field codes and that causes problems.

melelani

Hi.
I am having the same problem as others have described here. I have an 87 pages document with over 200 citations. When this was first happening, I went back and corrected each one that it changed. It is getting worse as it is going through more and more citations. I have not changed citation style. I have not done anything differently. I have tracked changes, but since reading the previous posts, I have accepted all changes and it is still happening. Please help.

I am using Zotero plug in on Word for MAC. I also have Zotero stand alone.

Thank you