Zotero Integration issue - You made changes on this reference - pop up

robinmaster

Dear community,

I am using Zotero with Mac OS in Libre Office.

Each time I press "refresh" (for bibliography) it says the following.

As I use APA Style 7th edition German version I have to write a sentence like this:
The the software Zotero from Zotero (2020) should be gold standard in teaching.

When I click "add citation" I load a reference, it integrates the reference and this issue appears. Sometimes it causes me to say "yes" to a numerous numbers of references.

It says literally: You made changes on this reference. Do you really want to keep those changes und prevent updates later? If you say yes there won't be any updates by zotero. Also in case that you add new references, change the citation style or the bibliography. If you say no the changes will be deleted.

Please help me with the issue. It causes a lot of trouble all the time.

https://ibb.co/k4mRXhg

dstillman

Yeah, you're doing this wrong. Don't edit the citation text directly — when you do that, Zotero needs to ask you if you meant to do that and want to keep your changes, which prevents Zotero from being able to further update the citation.

Instead, click within the citation, click Add/Edit Citation, click the blue bubble, and use "Suppress Author":

https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#suppress_authorsusing_authors_in_the_text

For citations you've already edited directly, you should really say No and then edit them properly using Suppress Author.

(Those question marks in the popup in place of diacritics are unfortunate, though. We'll look into that.)

dstillman

And see the rest of that Customizing Cites section for all the changes you should make through the citation dialog rather than in the text. It should rarely be necessary to edit the citation text directly, and if it is it's better to do so after unlinking citations in a copy of the document before submitting the paper.