Bibliography keeps disappearing

nabilseery

Hi, I know this problem has been posted previously but I can't find a consistent solution.. I have about 350 citations in a document - not sure if this is factor - but my bibliography sporadically seems to disappear, then spontaneously return - it seems a while after I press "add/edit bibliography" in word. Is there a way to stop the bibliography disappearing?

dstillman

I'd guess that you just have "Automatically update citations" disabled, in which case whenever you insert a citation the bibliography will revert to a placeholder until you next press Refresh and a new bibliography is generated. That's not a bug and is entirely how the feature is meant to work.

The placeholder should be visible in the document, however, and it explains that you have to press Refresh. Not sure if you're just not noticing that or something else is happening in your case.

nabilseery

Thanks for the feedback.
"Automatically update citations" isn't currently disabled.
The bibliography in the current circumstance disappears for 10 minutes or longer - i.e., the word count of the document drops by the amount of the bibliography until it comes back later..
Will try "automatically update citations" being disabled but don't understand why the bibliography needs to disappear completely and for so long..

dstillman

In a large document with many citations, and depending on what OS you're using, it can take a while for the bibliography to be updated. I'm not sure exactly what the disappearing is that you're referring to — that's not something I would expect you to see. But in any case, in a document of that size you should certainly leave "Automatically update citations" disabled. When you finally click Refresh to update the bibliography (which you only need to do at the end of writing, or periodically just to make sure it's working properly), you'll want to leave it alone until it finishes updating the bibliography, which could take a number of minutes.

nabilseery

Thanks very much. The bibliography literally disappeared for long periods but it hasn't happened for two days. On a side note - for the last hour or so zotero keeps malfunctioning since I disabled "automatically update citations". After I disabled it, when I added new citations and pressed "refresh", nothing would happen.. the new citations became '1,2,3" etc, where they should have been e.g. 353, 354.. - which I suspect is normal. But since refresh did not do anything, I tried to re-enable automatic updates. Now I'm not sure what this is a corollary of, but when I try to add a single citation, before I can even type anything in, zotero begins updating every single citation in my document - but it's not really updating them, just highlighting each number e.g. 265 - 264 - 263 etc all the way to citation 1. I have restarted both it and microsoft word, and this has happened 3 times. This is probably a specific glitch but do you have any ideas how to help? Sorry.. it is almost unusable currently with this amount of citations, but I have no way out - I need to finish this document soon..

nabilseery

Sorry - this glitch aside - I assume the way forward would have been - to disable "automatic updates" - but I waited up to a minute after pressing "refresh" following the addition of new citations and nothing happened (i.e., they remained, "1,2,3") - is there any way around this?

adamsmith

I'd switch citation styles back and forth if regular refresh doesn't work -- I've seen a number of reports of the Refresh button not doing what it's supposed to, so that doesn't mean anything else is broken.