Styles gone missing

Annebritingholm
During the last few years we have experienced, on rare occasions, that the citation styles in Zotero is missing when trying to insert a ciation in word. We know how to fix it, but why does it happen? (Often this is discovered during exams when our students wifi is closed and the option to import styles not available.) Do you have any suggestions to why this happens and how we can avoid it?

Best regards
Anne Brit Ingholm
Librarian
Mailand upper secondary school
Norway
  • zuphilip
    on rare occasions, [...] citation styles in Zotero [are] missing when trying to insert a citation in word
    Do you mean they do not appear in the list and therefore are not installed previously? Are the citation styles then also missing in zotero itself? ( You can check that in https://www.zotero.org/support/preferences/cite#styles ) By default the most important styles are available in a new installation of zotero. But it is possible for a user to add or delete styles at any time. For adding you need the csl file either locally or over the internet.
  • Annebritingholm
    They used to be installed in Zotero (the default list - I dont think our students delete or add styles) but then they go missing in Zotero itself. This is not a common problem, but has occured 2 or 3 times (on different students) during the last months.
  • adamsmith
    hard to say without more context on when that happens. One of my guesses would be a corrupted style folder, e.g. when students place their database in Dropbox or the like.
  • Annebritingholm
    Tanks! I will check out your corruped style folder theory the next time this happens:)
  • Annebritingholm
    It happend again today, the citation styles were missing, and the student had not placed Zotero in dropbox or the like. We downloaded the styles again, no stress, but it would have been nice to understand why this happens. My fear is that it will happen when a student is offline during an exam. Then the drag and drop possibility (as we recommend if there is something wrong with the Zotero add-ins in word while students are offline) will be gone as well and there is no way to export citations from Zotero. Any other suggestions to why this occurs?
  • adamsmith
    we've really not seen this before and certainly not repeatedly. I suppose it could be related to your security software suite?
    If you could submit an error report ID right when this happens next time, that might help to figure it out.
  • Annebritingholm
    Sure! How do I submit an error report:)?
  • adamsmith
    https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems#provide_a_report_id
  • fl0_id
    I can confirm that this happens, though in my case (since this is a relatively new installation) I cannot say if the styles disappeared or were not installed in the first place. Anyway they are not installed, and when I click "get the latest translator and style updates" in settings it says it is at the latest, but no citation styles are there.
    Any ideas?
  • adamsmith
    You'd fix this using "Reset Styles" in the advanced tab of the Zotero preferences.
  • fl0_id
    Wow, thanks so much. Somehow I missed that button, and absolutely no idea how they all disappeared. (and sorry for hijacking the thread but it seemed to be related)
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