Parenthetical citations keep creating problems

AdamKucz

A section of my citations keeps causing problems for me (the same section every time). I am told that I manually modified a citation and asked if I want to keep the modification (yes) or revert back (no). If I keep the modification, the parenthetical citation disappears. If I say 'no' then the following happens:

(van Roekel et al., 20(van Roekel et al., 2013)13)

where the '(van Roekel et al., 20' and the '13)' are regular text and the middle (van Roekel et al., 2013) is the actual citation.

Using Libreoffice on Ubuntu 20.04.

dstillman

It looks like the citation text somehow got copied outside of the citation. Just delete the citation and text completely and reinsert the citation.

AdamKucz

I tried that already and the problem still keeps showing up unfortunately.

dstillman

Does it happen for this citation in a new document?

AdamKucz

Doesn't happen to be appearing when I create a new document.

dstillman

Then you're either not deleting enough of the citation in the original document, there's some issue with another citation in the document, or there's an issue with the specific citation style or ReferenceMarks/Bookmarks mode. The first one is by far the most likely.

In general, see the final step in Troubleshooting Errors in Word Processor Documents, but there's a very good chance you just need to delete a bit more on each side.

dstillman

Put another way, if you can insert the same citation in the next paragraph of the original document without the same thing happening, then you'll know for sure that you just haven't fully deleted the broken citation.

AdamKucz

Okay I'll try cutting off bigger chunks on each side! Thank you, this has been an annoying time sink!

AdamKucz

Unfortunately I am back. I basically re-wrote these entire paragraphs prob the issue keeps happening. It is still constrained to these particular ~6 citations. Any other suggestions?

dstillman

You'll want to follow the last step on the linked page, which explains how to cut down your document to the smallest possible section that reproduces the problem. That will either show you what the problem is so you can fix it or isolate a section of the document that reliably triggers a bug so that you can share it with us for us to fix.

AdamKucz

I definitely know which section of the document is causing the problem. It is the same 5 citations spread across two consecutive paragraphs. What's the best wya to share the bug with you all? Thanks.

dstillman

From the linked page:

You should also send the document excerpt from Step 10 and a link to your forum thread to support@zotero.org so that we can try to reproduce the problem.

AdamKucz

Got it, thank you!

adomasven

@AdamKucz The best advice I can give you here is to install LibreOffice 7.0.3, which now shows the location of the bookmarks in the document if you toggle formatting marks (¶ button, Ctrl-F10). If you insert citations with bookmarks in a new document you will see, that a bookmark encloses a Zotero citation fully, whereas in your document they are 0 length bookmarks. I do not know how they turned that way, but they did at some point during the editing of your document, so you should figure out how to reproduce that and then we can look into fixing it.

AdamKucz

Thanks for the tip. I am using 7.0.3 and see exactly what you're talking about. One thing that seems to reproduce the problem is closing and re-opening the document. If I add a new citation in to replace it, it'll be 0 length after re-opening. This happens only with these 5 specific citations.

adamsmith

Interesting. It'd be helpful to see those items. Could you go to Zotero, select those 5 citations, --> right-click--> Export selected items --> CSL JSON
Open the file in any text editor (like gedit), select all, copy, paste to pastebin.com, hastebin.com or a similar site, and post the link here.

AdamKucz

Here it is: https://pastebin.com/SREHKHMU

(there are 6 citations, I miscounted)

AdamKucz

FWIW, I just deleted the entire paragraphs and rewrote from scratch, and the issue still occurs after closing and re-opening the document. Although not with the Lim et al. (2016) citation in the second paragraph, so now it's just constrained to that first paragraph.

adomasven

This seems like some sort of unusual document corruption. Try:
1. In Zotero Document Preferences switching to Reference Marks
2. Copying the full text of the document to a new document
3. Switching back to Bookmarks again

Then see if you still see this issue.

AdamKucz

Unfortunately this didn't fix the issue either. It's also happening to a selection of new citations I have added into the document (into a different paragraph) if you'd like to take a look at those as well. Thanks!

AdamKucz

FWIW in additional debugging:
When I open the document, the citation bookmark becomes empty. However, if I then switch from bookmarks to reference marks, the citation re-populates.

So it looks something like this, where the content between `[` and `]` is the bookmark/referencemark
Upon opening doc: (van Roekel et al., 201[]3)
Upon switch to reference marks: (van Roekel et al., 201[(van Roekel et al., 2013)]3)

AdamKucz

Back with an update:
After switching to reference marks in an ODT file, the problem has gone away. It still occurs with reference marks in a DOCX file.

dstillman

Yes, you need to use an .odt file with ReferenceMarks. (It says that in the plugin's Document Preferences, where you choose the mode.)

dstillman

@adomasven may have other thoughts on the Bookmarks issue, but unless you need to exchange the document with Word users, you should always use ReferenceMarks and .odt in LibreOffice. (And even if you do need to go back and forth with Word, using ReferenceMarks and following the document transfer procedure may be more reliable.)

AdamKucz

Yeah I think this is what I'll do moving forward. I don't need to use MS Word myself, but my collaborators use it so still an issue. Thanks for debugging this and let me know if you'd like me to do any more testing on my end!