Fixing broken links to references using Word plugin

mhoerner

I apologize if this is a duplicate thread, but I have been unable to find any threads covering this exact topic. I am having a problem where just a few of my references will not update, even though they have been changed in Zotero. I know that they are not updating because the name of the author or the author order has been fixed in Zotero, but will not update in Word. Based on the many somewhat related threads that I have read, I suspect that in the process of merging duplicate items in my library, I broke a few citation links and that Word is now using the information stored in Word rather than connecting to Zotero. That said, I am at a loss as to how to fix these links. I am working on my dissertation, which has well over 700 references and many more individual in-text references which took several days to add the first time, and as I have just a few days left before I have to send the completed draft to my committee to review, I really do not have time to go back through the whole thing and start over. Is there any way at all to fix these broken links without doing that? Thank you very much in advance for any help you can give me.

adamsmith

There's nothing automated, but just deleting and re-inserting the citation, making sure to chose from "My Library" should work well.

mhoerner

Thank you very much for your response. I tried that, and it worked for some of the references that were refusing to update. Unfortunately, for some reason, even choosing from my library, the last few of these references won't update and I've tried every solution I've been able to find online. Is there anything that can be done to perhaps delete the document's memory of the old reference or otherwise manually repair the links?

adamsmith

There is no secret memory of the old references, so not sure what's going on.
How can you tell they're the old versions? How exactly are you deleting/replacing them?

In a copy of the document, try changing the citation style to something completely different (say a numeric style like IEEE if you're using an author-date style or vice versa) and back. Do the stuck citations change along or not?

mhoerner

I'm sorry for the slow response. I had no internet access yesterday and so I just worked on some of the other things that need to be done.

I had assumed that the issue was that the references were not updating in the document. However, in a new document, I am still having the same issues. For example, one of the problematic references has the author order wrong. It should be Redford and Eisenberg, but in my documents (including a new document), it shows up as Eisenberg and Redford. I have long since corrected this problem in the Zotero stand-alone, but it continues to show up wrong in my documents. I am at a complete loss.

Thank you for your help.

adamsmith

You're sure there's not duplicate? And are you using Firefox or a different browser? (Asking because it may be that you have a separate database in Firefox accidentally)
And when you right-click on the item in Zotero and create bibliography, it comes out correctly?

mhoerner

There is definitely no duplicate. I have checked probably two dozen times because I keep thinking there has to be another reference it is reading from somewhere. I use Chrome (I don't even have Firefox installed). The bibliography and in-text citation when I right click on the item in Zotero come out correctly, although that was a good thing to check as it had not occurred to me.

adamsmith

How about when you use the classic view of the Word add-on to insert the references. That way you can select it from your collection tree and make sure it's definitely the same one you see in Zotero. Get to the classic view by clicking on the little triangle/arrow at the left of the insert citation bar of the Word add-on.

mhoerner

This is interesting! I didn't get to try your classic view citation because evidently, somehow, generating the citations from the item in Zotero caused the updated version to become available in the normal add-citation view as well. I have no idea why that worked, but I'm just so glad that it did! Thank you!