Zotero citations in Word interfere with word count function

CC007

I have recently started using Word 2016 (32 bit) and am noticing that citations are interfering with the word count. For example, today my word count prior to entering a Zotero reference is 8309 words. I enter the reference and the word count DROPS to 7422. [The citation itself is 3 words and automatic Zotero updates are disabled in the document.]

When I do a Zotero refresh, the word count jumps to 8456, but the number of words in both the citation and the complete reference is only 32 when I count them manually.

I have previously experienced problems with Zotero counting the words in metadata 'behind' the citation so I wonder whether something like this is going on here, but it means I am not at all confident that the word count is accurate in a document with multiple citations.

Do you have a solution, or a workaround to ensure accurate word counts? [At the moment, I have to 'copy all' and 'paste as text only' into another document in order to get an accurate count which is not a great solution!]

CC007

I did the above with 'track changes' turned on, so I initially thought that this might explain the big difference in word count, but have repeated without 'track changes' and the result is the same.

bwiernik

This isn’t really a Zotero problem, but unfortunate behavior with how older versions of Word handled Fields (the feature Zotero and other programs use to store data, as well as many built in Word features, such as Tables of Contents and Captions). Before Word 2016, Word would count all the underlying data in Fields in Word count, rather than just the displayed text.

That behavior is fixed to be more logical in recent Word versions. I recommend you update to Word 2019/Word 365.