Having problems in removing citations from paper

zghncszdy

My Zotero works smoothly when adding new citations but, everytime I try to remove those citations from my paper (with generated bibliography attached at the end of the document, of course!), the bibliography items related just won't alter accordingly. I then clicked the "refresh" button to figure out if it was due to network latency, unfortunately, it's not! A window pops up saying: "attempting to generate bibliography without having updated processor items" It's really frustrating because i have to delete these items manually, one by one.
I'm using Mac OS 10.14.3, Word 16.23 and Zotero 5.0.64.
Thanks in advance.

adomasven

Does it work if you restart Zotero?

zghncszdy

Sadly, no.
But I find that this annoying situation only occurs when you have only one citation. In cases where more than one citation are listed, removing one citation would be alright--the related bibliography item would disappear instantly.
P.S. Report ID: 864233248

adamsmith

How are you deleting citations exactly?

zghncszdy

First I click the Add/Edit Citation Button on Zotero tab page,then delete the very item I wish to get rid of, then press the “return” key. That's all.

adomasven

We should probably just remove the bibliography from the document instead of display a non-descript error message in such situations, but the error is what it is - you cannot have a bibliography without having cited any items in the document.

adamsmith

If you want to delete an entire citation (including a citation with one single item), you can just delete it in Word using backspace or delete. No need to use add/edit, which I'm not surprised has unintended consequences when you use it to remove the only item in a citation.

zghncszdy

Sometimes I would just delete citation in plain text, that's not right isn't it?

adamsmith

That's exactly right, yes.

zghncszdy

I wish I have got your point: When a citation contains only one single item, just delete it as we would do to plain text, then the bibliography attached would be deleted automatically.

zghncszdy

Thanks again for your patience and prompt reply!

zghncszdy

I've tried again today, things remain the same, I wonder whether it's a design flaw or something else. I'll specify the problem here:
e.g.
aaa(name1,year1)...bbb(name2,year2)
reference:
(bibliography1)...
(bibliography2)...
As you suggested, I deleted (name1,year1), after clicking "refresh" button, the (bibliography1)... in reference section were removed, that's good.
now we have:
aaa...bbb(name2,year2)
reference:
(bibliography2)...
But when I deleted (name2,year2), again clicking "refresh" button, whoops, warning appears.
The way I see it, the bibliography should always keep in line with citation in spite of the number of items involved. For example, if I delete the very last citation in the text, the bibliography should just be cleared also.
i.e.
aaa...bbb
reference:

Hope that in future version Zotero will be more user-friendly. :-) @adamsmith