Mysterious modified citation

changke

Hi,

Sometimes when I alter/add a citation to my Word doc, I'll get a dialogue box saying,

"You have modified this citation since Zotero generated it. Do you want to keep your modifications and prevent future updates? Clicking 'Yes' will prevent Zotero from updating this citation if you add additional citations, switch styles, or modify the item to which it refers. Clicking 'No' will erase your changes."

I click "No", my intended citation appears in the appropriate location while the the modified citation also appears in another section of the document. I removed this citation from the document's bibliography and just removed it entirely from my online Zotero but I'm still getting this error message. Do I need to restart my computer to get Zotero to restart? Should I be clicking "Yes" instead? The dialogue box pops up frequently and gets rather irritating...maybe it's user error and not Zotero/Word?

More clarification can be given if my explanation isn't clear. Thanks in advance!

fbennett

That message pops up at the next add/edit on citations that have been edited directly in the word processor text. To avoid the pop-up and keep everything updating automatically, change citation text by setting the cursor in a citation and clicking Add/Edit Citation. Click on the bubble of the reference to open a dialog, and you can add page pinpoints and affixes.

When you delete an item from Zotero (in the database), it remains in the document as an "orphan," which is not what you want. You can identify orphans by opening them with Add/Edit: they will not show a link button to open them in My Library (because they no longer exist there). For those references, reinsert them, preferring items under the "Cited" heading if they show up there.

adamsmith

Is this always the same citation that gets flagged as "modified"? In this case, the document may contain a "ghost" version of that citation, e.g. because it didn't get deleted properly. One thing to try would be to show field codes (see https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes ) and make sure the entire code related to that citation is deleted.