BUG: Zotero LibreOffice Plugin Modified Citation Hell

This is possibly the weirdest bug I have ever come accross, it took me long enough to realize what was going on that it nearly destroyed a whole chapter of my thesis, PLEASE help me find a solution, I had to copy and paste all my work to a new file and I'm still not sure it solved everything!

Setup details:
OS: Windows 10
Zotero version: 5.0.95
LibreOffice version: 7.0.3.1 (x64)

What I did:

I was writing a chapter of my thesis, specifically an appendix to a chapter. Zotero plugin was set to auto-refresh, so everytime I added any citations anywhere, it would try to update these citations. The worst case was this citation that went "Klein (1960) proposed..." etc etc, I had modified this citation, but since I realized that Zotero Plugin doesn't like modified citations, I had cliqued "No" to the prompt and allowed it to revert it to the orininal format (ie "(Klein 1960)").

At some point I decided this whole paragraph should be somewhere else, copied the text further up to the chapter proper, and deleted the paragraph, citation included. This might be relevant: I suspect that Zotero Plugin sometimes interprets deleting a citation as modifying it.

Like I said, it took me a long while to realize something might the wrong, so I can't tell when exactly the issue started.

The Bug:

Zotero Plugin somehow decided that The Whole Paragraph was part of the citation, and shows it in "citation modified" prompts, sometimes as the modified version, sometimes as the original. I took a lot of screenshots of this but I don't know how to show the screenshots here. Regardless of if I click yes or no, it then copies the whole paragraph, highlightted as a citation, in the middle of my text, in the place where there should be NOTHING BECAUSE I DELETED THE PARAGRAPH ages ago. Deleting this does literally nothing, next time I refresh it says "hey you modified this citation!!! Original: huge paragraph. Modified: Huge paragraph" and no matter which I click, the citation multiplies like bacteria. I made some tests and currently I have five pages of repeated text created by this bug, after refreshing three times.

Meanwhile, another one of my citations is duplicating itself. Currently it looks like this: "(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006)(Grimm et al. 2006). " The mode of the bug is similar: it shows me the modified citation prompt, and regardless of which option I choose, it creates this duplicated citation. The only difference is that it didn't include a whole other paragraph.

Anyway I just spent an hour trying to purge this error from my files. Deleting the affected areas does nothing. Copying and pasting the unaffected areas in new files works, thankfully! I was this close to rewriting everything in LaTeX.





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Actually let me copy-paste an example of what this crazy prompt looks like:

"Você modificou essa citação desde que o Zotero a gerou. Você gostaria de manter suas modificações e evitar futuras atualizações?

Clicar em "Sim" impedirá que o Zoter atualize essa citação se você vier a adicionar citações suplementares, alterar estilos, ou mesmo modificar as referências a que ela se refere. Clicar em "Não" apagará as suas modificações.

Original: (Klein 1960) [[refs]]. In grassland-forest mosaics, grassland fires often affect the forest edges, and could be a mechanism preventing or slowing forest expansion. A. angustifolia has several traits that allow individuals to survive fires, while most shade-tolerant species in Araucaria Forests are much more vulnerable to burning. We propose that the frequency of fire might be a relevant condition preventing the establishment of most broadleaved tree species on forest borders, and that the edges dominated by A. angustifolia might function as a buffer, protecting these vulnerable species from the spread of fires. Furthermore, since fire had a tendency to spread upwards, the pressure from fires should make forest patches in valleys more resistant than those in plains or ridges.aforestation of succession, with A. angustifolia as the pioneer species slowly colonizing the grasslands around the forest patch and simultaneously being excluded in the forest interior. Meanwhile, multiple studies have shown that fire dynamics are important for maintaining grassland ecosystem, preventing proccess species can grow. Thus, the forest edge is in a constant broadleafed adults, they create a tolerable environment where angustolia forest species that populate the forest interior cannot withstand the conditions of the forest edges and surrounding grasslands; but when such locations are covered by A broadleafed(Klein 1960) proposed, as an explanation, that A. angustifolia functions as a pioneer species driving forest edge expansion. According to that theory, A. angustifolia cannot regenerate inside the forest due to light competition, so young individuals can only grow in forest edges, where light is abundant. Conversely, the (Klein 1960)
Modificado: [[refs]]. In grassland-forest mosaics, grassland fires often affect the forest edges, and could be a mechanism preventing or slowing forest expansion. A. angustifolia has several traits that allow individuals to survive fires, while most shade-tolerant species in Araucaria Forests are much more vulnerable to burning. We propose that the frequency of fire might be a relevant condition preventing the establishment of most broadleaved tree species on forest borders, and that the edges dominated by A. angustifolia might function as a buffer, protecting these vulnerable species from the spread of fires. Furthermore, since fire had a tendency to spread upwards, the pressure from fires should make forest patches in valleys more resistant than those in plains or ridges.aforestation of succession, with A. angustifolia as the pioneer species slowly colonizing the grasslands around the forest patch and simultaneously being excluded in the forest interior. Meanwhile, multiple studies have shown that fire dynamics are important for maintaining grassland ecosystem, preventing proccess species can grow. Thus, the forest edge is in a constant broadleafed adults, they create a tolerable environment where angustolia forest species that populate the forest interior cannot withstand the conditions of the forest edges and surrounding grasslands; but when such locations are covered by A broadleafed(Klein 1960) proposed, as an explanation, that A. angustifolia functions as a pioneer species driving forest edge expansion. According to that theory, A. angustifolia cannot regenerate inside the forest due to light competition, so young individuals can only grow in forest edges, where light is abundant. Conversely, the (Klein 1960) areas, is the abundance of Araucaria angustifolia individuals on the forest edges, forming a ring around forest patches.mountanousA common pattern observed in Araucaria Forests in forest-grassland mosaics, particularly in
"

  • Sorry about the trouble. Under Zotero Document Preferences are you storing citations as Bookmarks or Reference Marks? Bookmarks are unfortunately very prone to getting corrupted and you should only use them if you need to share the document with a Word user, but you should be more careful with heavy formatting and text modification around citations or just use Reference Marks and only switch to Bookmarks when sharing the document.
  • Hi, thanks for the reply. I have only been using Reference Marks.
  • Ok. Unless you can reproduce it now, you should enable field shading in LibreOffice and continue working with the document. You might be able to identify which step lead to the issue.
  • Field shading is already active. I don't really know how to identify which step led to the issue. So far I haven't been able to reproduce in a new file.
  • If field shading is enabled, it should be clear when you're accidentally typing inside of a field or not deleting an entire citation, because there's a gray background.
  • believe me, I know. I have taken utmost care in never writing inside a citation (to the point of leaving all my citations safe inside double parentheses, lately), and always deleting all the grey area. And yet.

    Is there a way I can send the offending file to you so you can see what I'm talking about? or at least the screenshots?
  • Yes, you can send documents to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread. Screenshots you can send but it's better upload somewhere (e.g., Dropbox) and post a link here so others can see them.
  • edited January 14, 2021
    @lobz: But I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. When using Reference Marks with field shading enabled, to get an error message like the one above, with those huge blocks of text, those blocks of text would need to be within the fields, and in that case they should have shading. Are you saying that's not the case?
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