Ghost Citations

chrislux

I am finalizing a document in Word that has been through several revisions.
When reviewing the bibliography and numbering, I have two citations (#19 and #20) that are no longer in the document as far as I can tell.
1) Is there a way to find the citation in the document starting from the bibliography reference? (Like right click, go to citation)
2) Can I delete the reference from the bibliography without locating the initial citation?

bwiernik

First try to click the Refresh button in the Zotero tab to see if they go away.

If not, Go to the part of the document where the citations would be (based on the numbers), select all of the text, and type Alt+F9 to show the citation field codes. If codes for the two citations appear, then delete them and type Alt+F9 again to hide the codes.

djross3

I don't know if there's an option to do this directly, but here's an alternative, assuming you can't just search the author's name in Word's search normally:

Select All* and right click on a citation field, "Toggle Field Codes".** All of the Zotero cites will expand to reveal the code behind them (an embedded version of each of your references). Then you should be able to use Word's normal search to look for the author's name (or other uniquely identifying information) in one of those fields.

*You may need to also do this separately also for footnotes, because of limits on how Word selects "all".
**If you're working with a very long document this might take a few moments and could extremely increase your page count, so give Word a moment to catch up. You can toggle them again to go back to normal. Don't edit the content of the fields directly; if you're uncomfortable doing this, then try it in a copy of your document.

I assume that would work, unless the problematic cite is very broken (to the point where it no longer contains the right metadata, but I'm not sure how that would happen).

Of course another method is to split the document in half, repeatedly, each time locating which chunk of text is producing the broken citation. Within several iterations (2^x) you'll narrow it down to a specific region of text and be able to figure out what's going on.

chrislux

The power of forums to the rescue!!!
Alt+F9 revealed the offending citations and allowed for them to be fixed.
Would not have found that without your assistance. Many thanks!