Chicago references do not automatically adjust in numbering after deletion

kevinwilson

Hi,
I've spoken to a PhD student who is using Zotero for her citations and she's also adding explanatory footnotes. I've posted on here before about this and it seems the two don't contradict.

She showed me a draft of her PhD and where she's deleted some references that she made in Zotero, the numbering of the footnotes hasn't adjusted e.g. she deleted references 8-10. 11 should revert to 8 in theory, but it stays as 11. It happens in a few other places. A refresh doesn't work, neither does switching to Harvard and then back to Chicago (in fact, it doesn't even switch style at all!)

I showed her in a new document how removing one reference should make Zotero change the numbering to keep it consecutive. Can you think of why this isn't working or whether there's a workaround?

Many thanks
Kevin

bwiernik

Try inserting a new reference, rather than just clicking Refresh. Also verify that the 11 reference is a live Zotero reference, not plain text.

If that doesn't work, what is probably happening is that there is a bit of leftover hidden text for the deleted reference. Cut out the section of text that had 8-10 from the document. Then Refresh. If that works, then paste the cut text to a new document, use Alt+F9 to Show Field Codes, and then delete the hiding Zotero codes.

kevinwilson

Hi bwiernik,

Thanks for your help. She doesn't want to add a new reference, just make the numbering consecutive. I don't have her document, but I'm pretty sure she has been adding Zotero citations around her manual footnotes. I gather that if she did this from the start, this would work fine. However, I think she started using Zotero a while into her writing, so she's been putting Zotero citations in and around her manual footnotes. Not sure if this has caused a problem. I imagine she's got rid of the section that had the 8-10 footnotes. I might ask her for a copy of her document as I doubt she'll know about field codes - I've never used them but if I made them active, would it be obvious what to delete?

Kevin

bwiernik

Regarding adding a new reference, I am just suggesting that inserting a new reference may help Zotero to update its numbering versus just refreshing. You could delete the reference and Refresh afterward. You could also try to just insert a manual footnote and see if the numbering updates. Since this is Chicago (note or full-note), Zotero doesn't actually handle the numbering--it just tells Word "insert a footnote here".

It's somewhat hard to follow exactly what her process was and what the state of her document is from your description, so it would be much easier to troubleshoot if you had a copy of her document to work with.

For the field codes, after you hit Alt+F9, it will show big blocks of code wherever there is a Zotero field (this hidden information is what Zotero uses to format references).

kevinwilson

Thanks! I've asked for a copy of her document. I've asked her to check whether she can add a new reference though or whether there's anything hanging around from the deleted references. Hopefully we don't have to just copy the text over, unformatted, into a new document and start again!
Kevin

adamsmith

Right, so as bwiernik says, if footnotes stop renumbering that's typically not a Zotero issue. Zotero just inserts Word footnotes. There are various posts, easy to find by google, on the Word issue, so I'd look for those.

fbennett

Piling on here, but if the style isn't changing, you'll need to look at the document and see if the citations are still connected to Zotero. If not, the text is what there is.

Mixing manually inserted footnotes with Zotero-generated references is not a problem, so no need to worry about that angle.

kevinwilson

Thanks guys, I think I might've solved this problem. The student had some unresolved track changes and as you might guess, citations 8-10 were within those track changes. As soon as she accepted them, it all seems to be resolved! There aren't any more jumps in sequence of citations.
Thanks for your help,
Kevin