Bibliography NOT Reflecting Document

teisenman

I'm encountering a very odd issue: the bibliography in a Word doc is being populated by sources that are not cited in the body text. I have no idea why/how this happening, and I cannot figure out how to get the bibliography to accurately reflect the in-text citations.

Can anyone help?

teisenman

PS: I tried deleting the Bibliography and reinserting via the Zotero command for "Insert Bibliography", but again, the bibliography that gets inserted contains a bunch of sources that are NOT cited in the text. Very, very odd.

bwiernik

First, insert the blibliography, then click the Edit Bibliography button, and click Revert All.

If they persist, then the citations do exist somewhere in your document (perhaps they were formerly there and you deleted them, but inadvertently missed a parenthesis or similar. To troubleshoot, copy and paste your document into a new document until you find where the offending references are located, then delete them.

Additional troubleshooting steps here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents

teisenman

Thank you. I tried the first recommendation above, but the "Revert All" button is greyed out/not active.

Before I move onto the time consuming recommendation of recreating the document by cutting and pasting individual segments, do you have any thoughts on why "Revert All" is not active?

adamsmith

"Revert all" is not active because you haven't edited the bibliography, so that's not unusual (if you had, this would have almost certainly been the cause&fix, which is why bwiernik suggested it first).

As you debug this, what citation style are you using? This is probably going to be a lot easier to troubleshoot with an author-date style like Chicago author-date.

teisenman

Thank you both. I figured out a work around. As recommended, I clicked on "Edit Bibliography" and then I went citation by citation and removed those that didn't belong. So, I'm all set. :)