Allow modifying citations

wirorg

Hello:

[I sought for this and found no solution, so, I'm, asking for help!]

I accidentaly mass-changed my file and then a message occured, "You have modified this citation since zotero generated it. ... Clicking yes will prevent zotero from updating this citation ... Clicking no will erase your changes."

I clicked NO, I WANT ZOTERO to always modify them. But accidentaly, I clicked YES to some.
Now, I want to undo the "yes" action. I DO want ZOTERO to be in charge of that. How can I change it back?

djross3

This is a good question. The "yes/no" options are not very helpful here. If yes, then I'd like the citations to be highlighted so I can go back and fix them manually. If no, I'd like to be able to turn it "back on" as you ask here. Whenever this happens I don't like either answer, because it feels like something is wrong either way.
Why not a "not right now" option?

bwiernik

If you place your cursor in the citation and click Add/Edit Citation, then type enter to cause Zotero to refresh the citation, manual changes will be discarded and Zotero will resume automatic updating.

djross3

Ah, that makes sense! But I assume there's no way to automatically do that for all fields in the document, right?

bwiernik

No, I don’t believe so.

wirorg

Thank you all for your suggestions.
I understood that:
1. these cites are still usable;
2. gotta re-open them in order to make them changeable;
3. I have to seek them manually.

Now, what solution I found.
I use a style with brackets, looking like "[8, 55]".
I changed that to APA with round parentheses and searched for brackets.
I found all of them by searching for "[", re-opened them by Zotero and now I'm sure I missed none of cites.
Now, I'm changing the style back to my one.

Yet, having that as a program function would be of a huge help.
My paper is 270 pages long and this took me quite a while. Still, happy to have solved the issue.

adamsmith

I think there _might_ be a way to do this differently. Zotero sets some type of flag in the embedded item metadata (what you see when you toggle field codes in Word) when you tell it to not update. It should be possible to search for and flip that flag back -- sorry this is a bit vague, doing this from memory.