Recognition failure?

ccrifase

My Zotero is not recognizing all the fields and the bibliography in my document. It recognizes some... and it will recognize them all for a while, but then, for some reason, a few just turn into plain text. I've tried restarting, refreshing... there's no updates. Any ideas on how I fix this???

dstillman

What exact word processor version?

Citations should only turn into plain text if you or someone else saves the document in an unsupported format (e.g., .odt for a Word doc) that flattens all citations.

ccrifase

Version 16.23

I don't know. If I work on it all at once they remain active, but if I leave and come back some are just plain text. My whole bibliography is plain text now. I love Zotero, but as the number of citations goes up, I may lose my mind! I couldn't find any other forum posts where others have experienced the same thing...

dstillman

Well, again, this generally happens if you save as .odt rather than .docx, so you'd want to see if you're doing that by mistake.

ccrifase

No, I'm saving as .docx! Never saved as any other format.

I am continuing to lose more citations. I can't tell if it happens when I save it... or when I close and open it... or as time passes...

bwiernik

Do you encounter the problem in a new empty document?

ccrifase

I saved it as .doc and the fields came back. I was looking at the Document Settings and saw that "The document must be saved in .doc format." I'm not sure what difference it makes, but my default for Word has been .docx. Is there a version of Zotero that uses .docx? Do I just need to update?

ccrifase

Thank you both for your help by the way!!!

adamsmith

.docx should absolutely work. Which version of Zotero are you using?

ccrifase

Lol, fix didn't last long. I just inserted a citation and it immediately turned to plain text...

I'm using Zotero version 4.0.29.15

dstillman

You're using a version of Zotero from 2.5 years ago. You need to upgrade to Zotero 5, which you can do from the download page.

ccrifase

Oops. Downloading. I'm clearly not very tech-savvy. Should I be checking regularly for updated versions or did I miss an alert somehow?

dstillman

It should have offered you the upgrade, but it's possible that broke for you somehow. Unless you disabled updates, once you're on Zotero 5, there's a good chance auto-updates will resume working, but you can check the release history every now and then until you've made sure you're receiving updates.

ccrifase

Thank you!!!

adomasven

After installing Zotero 5.0 make sure you go into Preferences -> Cite -> Word Processors and reinstall the word plugin too.

Are you using Fields or Bookmarks to store citations? The version of Zotero still shouldn't cause citations to get unlinked. Does it happen in a new .docx document or only your existing one?