Editing Bibliography

CTICUpharmD

I am using the most updated version of MS Office 365 and just finished revising a manuscript using the American Medical Association citation style. I have the updated versions of the Firefox Zotero plugin and the MS word plugin. I had to delete some references out of my bibliography upon the first revision back from the journal editor. When I deleted the references (using the word processor plugin citation editor) the number order in the bibliography did not renumber itself nor did the in-text citations. I had to physically renumber all the subsequent citations in the text and bibliography sections. Any fixes to this problem??

adamsmith

How exactly did you delete the citations?
I think edit bibliography would in this case specifically be the _wrong_ way to do this.
Instead, you just want to delete all references to that citation in the Word document. (I hope I understood what you did right, otherwise please clarify).

CTICUpharmD

So, after the first review of the article it was deemed by the editors to thin out the number of references. So, I used the Edit bibliography in the word processor plugin and used the green arrow to remove the highlighted references. It did this, but not renumber the remaining references in the bibliography section or renumber in the text. What would have been the correct way?

adamsmith

OK, yes, that's what I understood. You can actually revert this by clicking "Revert All" in the Edit Bibliography dialog, so go ahead and do that.

What you want to do is this:
Find the corresponding references in the text and just delete them in Word (i.e. using backspace or delete). Then refresh to update the bibliography.


What Edit Bibliography allows you to do is to have citations in the text that aren't reflected in the bibliography. For other types of citation styles -- author-date or footnotes -- that can often make sense. But for numerical citation styles, since the citations itself are the numbers, this is essentially never something you'd want to use.

CTICUpharmD

So to clarify correct process, I would delete the in-text citation number in Word. For example, the superscripted 8-12 revised to read 8-11, then click Refresh in the plugin. This would then delete the original number 12? I was struggling with consecutive citations, e.g. 8-12 for consecutive references, that needs to have #11 deleted so that it re-numbers itself.

adamsmith

Ah yes, for those you'd have to use edit citation and just remove the no 11 one

CTICUpharmD

I tried and it caused an error. I have a screenshot of the error that I could send to an email address. But basically says it cannot delete the range.

adamsmith

Sorry about the delay. Uploading screenshot to free image hosting site (imgur, dropbox) would be helpful.

Also, could you say what exactly you did?

And, could you try deleting the entire bibliography and see if that helps? I believe we have occasionally seen the error that I'm suspecting here with corrupted bibliographies.

jomig

Dear Adam Smith, I guess I sort of have the same problem :
ie.
- I deleted some references from my word document using backspace in the text
- I inserted new references in the text using insert citation
- now my references jump from 97 to 107 and not from 97 to 98 as they should...
I use Word 2007 and latest zotero version with word pluggin.
I tried editing and it's not possible.
I also noticed zotero blank tags where I had deleted them when I go over the old emplacement with my mouse.

jomig

I also noticed I had trouble with zotero citing/editing when word document revision was enabled.
What can I do ?

adamsmith

Run through
https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
in particular, look at step 9, which may be helpful to identify items not properly deleted.

jomig

Thank you Adam Smith, invisible hand !
just had to accept all the changes (step 1)
have a nice day