google docs problems

andfried

Hi,

I am working on a document with ~350 of citations. I had started it in Word, but imported it to google docs. Things worked fine adding references, but I've run into trouble when modifying the bibliography through the dialog box (i.e. adding references to the bibliography that are not cited in the document). During a recent update, my bibliography became repeated several times at the end of the document, adding about 200 pages. I had to delete all the excess bibliographies manually. Has anyone else run into this issue?

Thanks, Andrew

bwiernik

This bug has been reported once or twice, but no one has been able to describe how to reproduce it consistently. If you can do it repeatedly, can you submit a Debug ID from the Help menu of Zotero for a sequence where you add a reference and then the bibliography is duplicated? One of the Zotero developers might have more questions.

dstillman

@andfried:

I had started it in Word, but imported it to google docs.

What do you mean by this, exactly? Did you use the Export Document feature in the Zotero beta to do the transfer? Because simply transferring a document between Word and Google Docs without using that feature will break your citations. You'll need to go back to the version in Word.

andfried

Thank you bwiernik and dstillman.

To clarify: I used the new Export Document feature after downloading a zotero beta version. This is an amazing new feature. I had to play around a little bit with the citation format, but otherwise it worked fantastically.

I will post more details if I am able to reproduce the google docs bug.

adomasven

@andfried what citation style are you using?

andfried

I'm using Harvard Elsevier

andfried

I'm running into other issues with the document as well. It's now failing to update, with the following error:

429: Google Docs request failed.

{
"error": {
"code": 429,
"message": "Resource has been exhausted (e.g. check quota).",
"status": "RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED"
}
}

adomasven

Is this running a refresh or something else? The plugin should generally not be hitting this error unless your document is exceptionally long or there is something very specific about it that makes it slow.

andfried

The document is about 30 pages long with over 350 citations.

Update: that latest error stopped, but it's taking forever to update - at least 30 minutes of "Zotero is updating your document. Please wait ..."

adomasven

You should avoid running the full refresh on a document, especially in Google docs, unless necessary (like before submitting the paper). With over 350 citations it is expected to take that long.

adomasven

Could you be more specific about which version of Elsevier Harvard you are using?

andfried

Here's the debug error from my recent session: D703167032. This did not have the repeating bibliography problem, but several other errors were reported.

I'm using Elsevier Harvard (with titles) from the standard zotero menu.

andfried

Also, I just turned off automatic refresh - thank you.

adomasven

Just to confirm, can you at least insert citations into this document?

andfried

Yes, I'm now able to insert citations again.

andfried

I've noticed a change after turning off refreshing: zotero is no longer adding letters to disambiguate multiple works by the same author e.g. Smith et al. 2019a. Is this a behavior that should come back when I re-activate document refresh, or is it unexpected?

adomasven

This is expected behaviour. It will update those items upon refresh.

andfried

Thanks!