box alert 'you must insert a citation to perform this operation'

d.diemidio

a. i have my word document opened up,
b. i have zotero opened too and it contains a number of pdfs,
c. i click on add/edit bibliography to add a journal ref,
d. the box alert comes up which says, ''you must insert a citation to perform this operation'

damnation

You need to have an actual item "cited" in the text (using the button "Add/Edit Citation"). The bibliography, which you are trying to add, is then generated from those cited items.

What type of document are you writing and what do you want to achieve? (Depending on what you want to achieve you can add bibliographic entries to paste into a document by right-clicking on the item within Zotero)

d.diemidio

hi, i understand i need to have the text above my bibliography from where Zotero picks up the main info, something like the year of publication and name which intelligent Zotero unpicks with all the citation info, including the doi number. yet this still does not work, i still have that box alert saying 'you must insert a citation before performing this operation'. i trylu do not get what i'm doing wrong, i place my cursor in the reference/bibliography section, click on add/edit bibliography but that damn alert comes up.

FYI: i initially thought my separate word doc -where i would create a w.i.p. bibliography- was already synced with my Zotero account in my laptop, but that's not the case.

i understand there is a way to have a separate bibliography from a main text (i.e. main text not included in the same word doc), by right clicking on the pdf and 'create a bibliography from item...' but i do not understand why i create a separate word doc for EACH right click i make on each pdf journal i want to list...i don't need that, i need all the references to be listed in one doc, obviously... but surely i'm missing something out.

hopefully you can help...btw are you just a random helper/expert or do you work for Zotero?

adamsmith

I think you're misunderstanding how Zotero works in documents. It doesn't just pick out information from text. You have to use "Add citation" for every citation to insert citations. Zotero then creates a bibliography from those citations.

For doing this from Zotero, you can just select multiple items (using ctrl+click on shift+click depending on what you need), right-click, and create a single bibliography for all of them.

d.diemidio

...definitely so, and am sorry about misunderstanding, but that's why i'm actually on this forums! perhaps you may want to enlighten me on the process step by step with an example?

d.diemidio

and btw i have to add/edit an already existing bibliography, i do not have to add citations, so what i don't get is why i get that box...i thought that by having a text already with citations inserted at the very bottom of the text i could simply click on 'add/edit bibliography' but as i said it doesn't work!

dstillman

adamsmith explained how this works:

It doesn't just pick out information from text. You have to use "Add citation" for every citation to insert citations. Zotero then creates a bibliography from those citations.

You can see full details on the Word Plugin Usage page.

If you're saying you manually added plain-text citations to the document — either by hand or by copying them from Zotero — then you don't have active citations in the document and you can't use the word processor plugin to generate a bibliography. To use the Word plugin in a given document, you need to use it from the beginning.

Zotero's RTF Scan feature can turn plain-text citations into proper citations and a bibliography, but you have to write the citations in a particular format.