Bug when refreshing footnotes and adding bibliography

TJtom

Hi,

my doctoral thesis has about 200 pages and 1000 footnotes. As Zotero got really slowly when adding new citation, I turned "auto refresh" off. As I'm about to finish my thesis now (after 2 years of writing), I hit the "refresh" bottom to refresh the footnotes. It took about half an hour and seemed to have worked just fine. (Zotero, Word on Mac)

Then the bug:
When reading through the document, I found that there has been added text to my text (not the footnotes!). There were fragments of my written text (about 5-6 words) that repeated about 20 times and filled about 3/4 page. I found that kind of bug 3 times in the doc.
Now I'm little scared that this bug changed/deleted etc. my footnotes or anything else in my text or will influence my bibliography in a wrong way. Is there any risk? I just deleted that "bug-text". Am I fine with that?

Now I got another issue with my bibliography.
When creating a bibliography there are no paragraphs between the single objects anymore, just a big block of text. How can I change that? When I first created a bibliography today, it worked just fine. However, after editing a footnote, the bibliography was gone (Automatic refresh is turned off). When I hit "refresh", there were no paragraphs anymore. Even after deleting the bibliography and creating a new one, there was still just a block of text. I've also restarted Zotero and Word yet. Does anyone know how to fix that?

Thanks!

bwiernik

What exactly was the text that repeated? Was this document text or part of the footnote text, was it next to a citation or footnote number?

The bibliography going away is expected when auto-refresh is off. As you found, you need to click Refresh to trigger the update of the bibliography. Paragraph spacing is controlled by the style. What style are you using? Can you post a picture of what your Bibliography looks like to a site like Dropbox or Imgur or similar and link here?

TJtom

Thanks for your answer!

Not 100% sure anymore (as I deleted it), but I guess it was document text. It might be that it was next to a footnote number as I have lots of them, but unfortunately again not 100% sure.

Can I change that? So that it stops going away (without turning auto refresh on (as it slows everything down)), as I'm just doing minor changes as adding a point or so.
I did not change the style or anything. I've been using "Juristische Zitierweise (Stüber) (German)" for 2 years now.

The bibliography looks as it should. Just the paragraphs are missing suddenly. I could add them, but it would last a while and if I refresh it, it would all be gone. Also, I am not sure if this is the result of a major issue.

It looks like:

"Max Mustermann, Ein Buch, Berlin 2018.
Erika Hase, Zweites Buch, München 2016.
Hans Wurst, Drittes Buch, München 2018."

instead of:

"Max Mustermann, Ein Buch, Berlin 2018.

Erika Hase, Zweites Buch, München 2016.

Hans Wurst, Drittes Buch, München 2018."

(I didnt do the italic)

My biggest concern is that the footnotes aren't correct anymore and I have to check every footnote again if it is correct. Is that likely? I also can't check the whole document for bugs everytime I hit refresh.

bwiernik

There is no way to be sure that the bibliography is correct when auto refresh is disabled, which is why Zotero removes it until manual refresh. The idea is that you shouldn’t pay any attention to the Bibliogrpahy until you refresh because any changes to your citation won’t be reflected there.

The spacing between entries in the bibliography is controlled by Word—this style doesn’t specify anything. To change it, place your cursor in the bibliography and open the Word Styles pane. Right-click on the Bibliography style, click Modify, then change the Paragraph settings in the Style to have a space after the paragraph.

Without knowing what the text was, I can’t really predict exactly what happened, but my prediction would be that the footnotes are correct, particularly if the text behavior doesn’t happen again when you click Refresh.

TJtom

I get that idea. Just don't want to be scared the whole doc screws up or I have to edit the whole bibliography just because I added a comma or sth in the footnote :P

Ok, I have to figure out how I do that without the whole document getting paragraphs^^.
I am just wondering. So far it worked every time and got me nice paragraphs. I did not change anything on word or Zotero and suddenly there are no paragraphs anymore.

I will have to refresh it again. I'll let you know if there are any further bugs. Lost a little trust in Zotero there... :(

adomasven

If you have a backup of the document pre-refresh and could send support@zotero.org a snippet of the document with the part where you got the repeating text, we could take a look at what happened and fix it if there's something wrong on our end.

Otherwise, bibliography styling is controlled by the Word processor. Zotero modifies the bibliography style withing Word once, when you select your citation style and then doesn't touch it, so whatever happened to the bibliography styling, likely came from somewhere else, rather than Zotero.

TJtom

I found a backup from the time after I refreshed the footnotes where the bug is not deleted yet. I did two screenshots of the document. I'll send it to you.

TJtom

Ok, now it's getting fucked up. I found another (shorter) bug-text in the document with the refreshed footnotes.
Then I checked a backup of the document which I made BEFORE I refreshed the footnotes and found the same bug-text there. How is that possible?!
Slowly I'm getting a little scared that the whole document and literature I created the past two years is getting screwed...:(((

adomasven

Please run through the debugging broken documents step #8 and email the snippet that produces the weird behaviour to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.

Slowly I'm getting a little scared that the whole document and literature I created the past two years is getting screwed

You should generally have nothing to worry about. In the worst case scenario, you might have a citation or two that are corrupt, but given that you can successfully refresh the document and insert the bibliography without any obvious artefacts (assuming you don't get the repeating text again), even that is highly unlikely.

TJtom

I sent two emails with screenshots of the bug-text. I used the subjects "TJtom: Bug when refreshing footnotes" and "TJtom: Bug when refreshing footnotes 2".

To delete half of the text and refresh the footnotes and look for bug-text would take about a day (refreshing takes about 1,5h). I have to refresh the footnotes anyway. I will do that this evening and see if the issue still occurs. If it does, I have no choice I guess... (which is bad timing as I wanted to hand my thesis in this week)...

adomasven

If you have identified the particular section of the document which produces text repetition after refresh (perhaps from your earlier backup), then you only need to do it for that section.

If you cannot reproduce anything problematic, your doc should be ok after adjusting the bibliography style.

adamsmith

But just to be clear, sending screenshots isn't the point. It's not that adomasven doesn't understand what you're describing -- he needs to be able to look at a (section of) a document that produces the error to troubleshoot it.

TJtom

Ok sorry, then I didn't get that right. If it helps: The bug-text was spread throughout the document (on page 30, 80, 124,...).

Anyway: I just made a (funny?) discovery: I found further bug-text. Then I turned off "show formatting characters" (which I had turned on since yesterday or so...) and the bug-text was gone. When I turned it on again, the bug-text appeared again. Does this help?!