Underlining in Citations

t0nnb

I'm having ongoing trouble with a long document that has dashed underlining on the citations.

I understand this is related to having 'automatic refresh' turned off, which I've done as part of the guidelines for long documents using Zotero. The problem is that when I manually refresh the citations . . . there is no change.

Any advice? I've read the long docs advice, I've read similar problems, and I've read the troubleshooting tips. Zotero's lack of ability to work with long docs is extremely frustrating, although this maybe a problem interfacing with Word as much anything else.

Any help sincerely appreciated!

bwiernik

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/citations_underlined

How many citations are in your document? If it’s a lot, “no change” probably just means that the document is still updating.

t0nnb

Thanks—you were right about the updating, in part, as it did ask if I wanted to conserve changes I'd made. The problem is: I've waited for over an hour since the last notification and even the first citations are still underlined.

I've read that document but it doesn't seem to help. Any ideas?

dstillman

No, you're referring to a different prompt — one about manual edits you made to citations, not about disabling automatic citation updates (though you would've had to have agreed to that too).

You likely made a manual change to the citation, and when Zotero prompted you whether you wanted to keep your change, you said yes. In that case, the citation won't be updated to remove the underline (which is a bug). If you want to keep your modification, you can probably underline it and then underline it. If you want to let Zotero update the citation, which you generally do, you should click on the citation and click Add/Edit Citation. Zotero should then prompt you to clear your modification. You'd need to do that for each citation that you modified.

You should almost never make manual edits to citations. See Customizing Cites to understand how to make changes properly.

t0nnb

Thanks, super helpful. You're absolutely right about manual edits, they were done 'on the fly' and became a huge hassle.

Having reverted all edits, though, I'm still left with the dashed underlining. The auto-update is disabled, which is what must be causing it, but manually updating seems to not change this. I know this takes a while but after more than an hour waiting without any visible change I'm assuming there might be a different problem.

The only thing I can think of is that it might do it 'section by section' rather than for the entire document. But when I try updating with the curser in a different section there's no change either. I will say that occasionally (inc. just now) Word forces itself into the front of my screen again, suggesting something is going on, but I see no actual changes.

Really appreciate the help by the way, any advice appreciated!

dstillman

Having reverted all edits, though, I'm still left with the dashed underlining.

What do you mean by this? How did you revert the edits? You have to revert them the way I describe in my previous message — by clicking Add/Edit Citation on one of the modified citations and then agreeing to revert them when prompted.

You should do this with "Automatically update citations" disabled. It looks like, if you do that with it enabled, Zotero doesn't currently check for the underline (since it doesn't expect an underline in that mode). If you disable automatic updates, click Add/Edit Citation, press Enter, and then press Refresh, the underline should go away.