Edit Bibliography Pane

rcamazed

It appears one of Zotero's recent updates broke the Edit Bibliography Pane.
The pane comes up, and I can select sources, but the arrow to move them into the bibliography pane no longer works. The arrow is unclickable. It acts the same if I open a new document and add a new bibliography, or if I am in my paper with a necessarily long bibliography.

It seems impossible to edit existing bibliographic entries. These are essential features that were working a month ago. I am part way through my dissertation, and too far in to change to different software. Can I rollback the updates somehow? (I guess I can manually add bibliographic entries, but I have twenty-plus pages of them in this paper, and that defeats the whole purpose of using Zotero!)

Is there anything I can do to fix this?
Zotero version 4.0.29.6
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010
Firefox 45.01

Thanks for your help,
Ryan

adamsmith

You may not be able to roll back easily on Firefox 45. Generally rolling back is easy (just install the old add-on and disable auto-updates. all old update URLs follow the same version, e.g. https://download.zotero.org/extension/zotero-4.0.28.10.xpi for the last pre-4.0.29 release. ), but you'd also have to roll back to an older Firefox.

Of course this should get fixed, but I'm also kind of surprised for what functionality "edit bibliography" is actually essential? What are you using it for?

rcamazed

Thanks Adam. I hope this issue gets fixed, and appreciate developers work.

Why is the edit bibliography pane essential?
In writing my prospectus for my dissertation, I have many sources which I do not cite in the footnotes, but which need to be included in the bibliography. In the edit bibliography pane, I could (can't anymore) specify which sources appear in the bibliography. I could add and subtract which sources should appear.

I anticipate needing to do the same when I am in the editing stages of my dissertation as well. In the dissertation, its more likely that I've cited the source already in a footnote, but there may be some sources that need to be included in the bibliography that don't actually make it into a footnote citation.

I saved a copy of the document under a new name, removed all Zotero field codes, and then manually copied over several entries. But that means each time I submit a revision, I have to remember to add in the right entries again.

dstillman

Fixed for the next version, which should be out soon (and available now in the latest 4.0 Beta).

rcamazed

Thanks Dan! I'm guessing you are the one who fixed it. I really appreciate how fast you took care of it. You have made my academic life significantly easier!

adamsmith

(and yes, that's exactly what the function is there for; I've just been seeing a fair number of people using it to edit details of individual bibliography entries, which almost always isn't necessary.)

dstillman

Fixed in Zotero 4.0.29.7, available now for Firefox. (A Standalone version will be available soon.)