Lost links to just some citations out of an 84page word document. Report ID 312844142

xenarivers

Report ID 312844142 probably won't help you much, as it's just a bunch of errors saying my author's names are too long--See the bottom of this report for that information*.

The real, deadly issue is that I found unlinked citations in my thesis, which is due in two days. I thought at first that it was nearly the whole thing, but it turned out to be 6 citations once I went through them all.
I did not press the unlink button
it is a regular .docx Word document
I am running Zotero 5.0.93
I am using Word 2013
I am on a Windows 10 pro 64-bit

The only thing I have done differently is to start synching my desktop Zotero with my Zotero.org (because I started a couple of groups with classmates, and wanted to see their sources on my desktop version). I hit that "too long" message, so I stopped. When, a day or two later, I found those unlinked citations I started synching those libraries again in hopes that it would fixt the problem. It didn't, and I just ended up with more "too long" errors.

So, I can't really reproduce this. When I re-started the synch I didn't seem to lose any more citations.


*Regarding the info the report shows: long author names are necessary because what Zotero outputs in the bibliography for Chicago author-date style is completely, 100% wrong based on the Chicago Manual (Turabian) so I've had to customize every single type of source to get it to print out in the correct format. It is horrible, but it's not the critical issue, above.

dstillman

It sounds like there are a few misunderstandings here.

If by unlinked citations you mean that there are citations in the document that are now flat text and not active Zotero citations, that wouldn't have anything to do with syncing, or even with Zotero itself. Zotero inserts standard Word fields, and if you don't use Unlink Citations, anything that flattens those fields would happen outside of Zotero. See Existing Citations Not Detected for the various possibilities — generally speaking, it'd happen if you or someone else saved the document in the wrong format or with the wrong tool. If you have flattened citations, nothing is going to fix them other than reinserting them with Zotero.

If you mean something else by unlinked citations (e.g., if you mean that they're active citations but orphaned from the entries in your database), please clarify.

long author names are necessary because what Zotero outputs in the bibliography for Chicago author-date style is completely, 100% wrong based on the Chicago Manual (Turabian) so I've had to customize every single type of source to get it to print out in the correct format

You're almost certainly mistaken about at least part of this.

First, styles in Zotero are shared with dozens of other reference managers, and most of the styles — and particularly the major ones — will produce correct output as long as the data is correct in your library. If there's something you think is wrong, start a new thread and provide more details on what you're getting and what you expect. There may just be a proper way to insert data or customize the citation that you're missing.

But also, the name-length limit is set high enough (255 characters per name part) that it will essentially never appear for any sort of valid use case. If you're getting that error for something you edited manually, you're doing something wrong. The only time you should get that error is if there's a problem when importing data — e.g., if a site serves bad data that ends up in the creator field by mistake — in which case you need to fix the field (and ideally post here with an example URL so we can fix the saving).

stnvcgc

I've had this exact problem. I've never used any word processor other than Word, all the documents are .docx and I haven't unlinked any citations (at least not manually - is there any process where this happens automatically?). I have different documents using some of the same sections of text - some have linked citations, some have dead text, and none of the documents have been used any differently: they are all saved in the same Onedrive folder as docx. I am the only person who accesses the file.
I can always go through manually and check every reference but this is a nuisance.

dstillman

No, there's no process where this is done automatically by Zotero.

Note that it could be something as simple as copying text temporarily somewhere else (though not another Word document, which would preserve the citations), or copying and pasting without style.

Storing the file in OneDrive could potentially cause problems, though I'm not aware of anything specifically related to Word fields — we've had other problems with files stored in OneDrive resulting in errors, but nothing like this. If you opened the document in OneDrive online, it's certainly possible that could do it.