issue inserting bibliography
Dear Colleague,
Each time I try to add my bibliography to the bottom of my text, I get a pop up called "Edit Bibliography". I have no intention of editing the bibliography there, but if there is a problem with a reference, I'd like to know so I can fix it. What do I need to do to have Zotero insert my bibliography? Or inform me of the problem so I can troubleshoot?
Many thanks for any advice.
Each time I try to add my bibliography to the bottom of my text, I get a pop up called "Edit Bibliography". I have no intention of editing the bibliography there, but if there is a problem with a reference, I'd like to know so I can fix it. What do I need to do to have Zotero insert my bibliography? Or inform me of the problem so I can troubleshoot?
Many thanks for any advice.
If you don't see it, toggle Word field codes and look for ZOTERO_BIBL, delete it completely (including any shaded part, depending on your Word field shading setting), toggle field codes back, and insert a new bibligraphy.
But a 7-minute delay between clicking Add/Edit Citation and the citation dialog appearing would certainly not be normal. A Report ID and clear steps to reproduce would be the first step to debugging further, though.
1) I went to the "_", clicked to cover it and with the mouse, clicked Add/Edit Citation button. The system immediately reacted as if checking an already made citation.
2) I didn't see any movement for 7 minutes so I thought it froze. I started typing my earlier response (above).
3) As I was typing the first 3 words, the system reacted and reverted back to my document where it wrote into the document "{Citation}".
4) Thinking that I should watch the bottom of the document (word count) to see if shows what Zotero is doing so I will know when it is done or freezes, I re-started the exact same process.
5) This time the system took 10 minutes to get through the pages all by itself. But at the end of the 10 minutes of Zotero going through what it needed to, it sent me an error message saying something went wrong and asking if I want to see troubleshooting information.
6) That is when I checked the end of the document and saw that my bibliography had been deleted.
7) Not wanting to delete my bibliography, I used the back arrow to go backwards to repair the bibliography.
Therefore, it was a 7-minute process the first time and a 10-minute process the second time. I'm not sure if all of this was captured properly, but the Report ID is 1630133668. Does that help?
If you can reproduce the 10-minute delay, we'd be curious to see a Debug ID (different from a Report ID) for an operation that's slow, after restarting Zotero. But to actually fix any errors you're getting with the document, follow the debugging steps, including deleting the bibliography. As explained there, in a copy of the document, if you can isolate a small section of the document that results in an error, it'd be great if you could that to us to look at it. But you also should be able to fix any problems in the document by following those steps.
For what it's worth, though not pictured in the screenshots, I suspect the "_" you referred to above was simply a citation that you had accidentally erased the text for, paired with the dashed-underline that Zotero adds to citations when you have "Automatically update citations" disabled to indicate that you haven't yet refreshed the document. The easiest solution with any broken citation is just to erase it completely — making sure you delete the whole thing — and reinsert it.
One of your screenshots shows the prompt to disable "Automatically update citations" (which appears if an update takes a long time), suggesting that you didn't have that off for the whole process. If you're working in a large document, you'll definitely want to leave that off, which should avoid the delay you were seeing when clicking Add/Edit Citation. A final Refresh can still take a very long time on a Mac — minutes — but insertions should be relatively fast. See Faster Citing in Large Documents to make sure you understand how that works.
1) When you see the modified-citation prompt, if you didn't mean to modify the citation, you should be clicking No to revert to the original version, not Yes. If you click Yes, you will end up with the empty/corrupted modified citation that the dialog is warning you about.
2) One of your screenshots shows you editing the file in Google Docs in .docx mode. If you're doing that with the same document you're editing in Word, that's almost certainly a source of the problems you're seeing. You can't edit a Word document you're using with Zotero in Google Docs without transferring it to Google Docs, following the special process documented on that page, as a native Google Docs document (not in the Google Docs .docx mode).
- I clicked "YES" to the error message having read the error message and thinking if I clicked "NO" it would prevent future updates. I will most certainly click "NO" now.
- Thank you for mentioning editing in a Google Doc. Some software I used temporarily transferred my Word docs into Google docs and I didn't notice. I will revert back to the Word document and continue.
- I went through the steps again. The first issue had already been resolved. When I clicked add/edit citation and waited, the second issue resolved itself. The Debug ID to show this is D557270061, if that helps.
Thanks in advance!