Link between Citation and Bibliography

I was adding the citation to a word document, after inserted the citation and created the bibliography, I noticed that if I click on the citation, the cursor does not bring me to the reference it is pointing to.
Is it something that I missed to configure or it is by designed?
I am using Word 2010, Windows 7 and Zotero 5.0.5.7.
Thanks!
  • I wouldn't call it by design, but it's not a feature available with Zotero currently.
  • Hmm..., is there any plan to make it available or is there an alternative way to create the link?
    Linkage between citation and bibliography is a must have feature in our documents.
    Thanks!
  • If you search around on these forums, some folks have written word macros that will work for some types of styles.
  • As a counterpoint, I would say that this would not be a desirable feature. When writing manuscripts, one rarely looks at the bibliography (why would you?). If you accidentally hit a citation, and that moves you to the bibliography or clutters your screen with a full citation, that would be disruptive to writing manuscripts.

    Reading manuscripts, now that's a different matter. It may help to display the reference in full in place (in a bubble?), and that would be nice to have. This may be difficult to accomplish well from a UX point of view.
  • If this becomes a feature (no idea if it will) this would be optional so that people can run it before sending/publishing their documents. It definitely wouldn't be turned on while writing
  • Hi enozkan,
    For us, it is required by the authorities that all of the citation must linked to its references, so they can go to the bibliography quickly if needed. Even during the writing phase, our authors would have it turned on when they are editing references.
    But I respect that not all users need this feature.

    Hi Adamsmith,
    Why this feature is not implemented? Maybe it won't easy, but shouldn't be that hard to do. I could be wrong though.
    Do you have the link to the macro people posted? I did some search but couldn't find what I need, I will also do more search.

    Thanks!
  • It’s quite a technically complex issue to solve, and, in my experience, most people who want such a feature write using LaTeX or Markdown, which already support it, rather than Word where this is much more difficult and fragile.
  • The mere technology isn't that complex -- you set bookmarks in the bibliography and then link to them in the text. What makes this complex are the implementation details.

    In particular, having looked at doing this a little, I think this will likely be built into citeproc rather than Zotero, although conceptually it'd be better for Zotero to handle (since it'd also need GUI integration).

    Here are some of the more substantive threads, including various macros, on this:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12431/word-possibility-to-link-references-and-bibliography-in-a-document/p1
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/21045/hyperlink-to-bibliography
  • @adamsmith,
    Thanks for providing technical insight and link to the previous discussion, I will check them. Maybe citeproc is the place to create these hyperlinks when it is building the bibliography, the linkage is right there. It will be harder to create the hyperlink after bibliographies are created. Hope Zotero engineer can look into this needs and bring some good news to us.

    @bwiernik
    In our company, we don't have the choice other than Word. In Word, the hyperlink can be created manually or maybe via macros provided in this forum, I thought that the hyperlink is the very basic needs when come to creating the scientific documents, although it was a surprise to me that some people actually does not want the hyperlinks in the their documents.

    Thanks all from the comments.
  • @qiwang113 if it can be done in Markdown as mentioned by @bwiernik, Pandoc can create Word files from Markdown. I use pandoc regularly when indeed the company demands I "use Word" (yuk) which in practice means "send me docx files" (can do, using Pandoc).
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