Zotero unlinking citations in Google Docs

alexafh
I've used Zotero with Google Docs and Microsoft Word for years without an issue. This week, Zotero has repeatedly unlinked the references in a Google Doc. No one else is working on it, I've been logged in to Google and Zotero the whole time, and I haven't copy-pasted any text into or out of the document. I tried restoring an old version of the document, fixed all the references, and Zotero unlinked them again. It's possible it happened when the computer went to sleep, or because the document is in a shared drive, but either one of those issues sounds like a huge bug. Any thoughts on how to prevent this in the future? Otherwise I think I have to go back to doing citations manually (!) rather than risk this again - the citations are in footnote style so once Zotero unlinks them, I can't tell what they were.
  • dstillman
    The only known cause of unlinking with the Zotero Connector installed is using drag and drop, which we're unfortunately not able to detect in Google Docs.
    I tried restoring an old version of the document, fixed all the references, and Zotero unlinked them again.
    When you revert to a previous version, make sure you press Refresh immediately to confirm that the citations are active — you won't be able to tell until you've asked Zotero to perform an operation. If it says they're unlinked when you click Refresh, they were already unlinked in that version, and you need to go back to an earlier version. The warning appears the next time you interact with Zotero after the operation that caused them to be unlinked.

    If you can reproduce citations getting unlinked for a specific action — i.e., revert to a previous version, Refresh without getting a warning, do some specific action, and then get the warning on the next Zotero operation — we'd definitely want to know the exact steps.
    It's possible it happened when the computer went to sleep, or because the document is in a shared drive
    Definitely not related to sleep. What do you mean by "in a shared drive"? We're talking about Google Docs, so everything is online. Do you mean a shared folder in Google Drive? As long as you're opening the document in the standard Google Docs interface, it should be fine.
  • alexafh
    Just standard Google Docs in a shared Google Drive. I didn't click Refresh after reverting to an older version. However, I did manually re-insert all the citations from Zotero this week that were unlinked, and Zotero then unlinked many of them that day. This shouldn't be a version issue (since they had just been added into the current version) unless the unlinking prevents future citations being added to the document for all time, which would be ... weird.
  • adomasven
    Whatever change happened between Zotero citations being linked and unlinked should be possible to trace and revert with Google Docs document version history as long as you are sure that all citations were linked at some point. As Dan said above, you will need to revert to an earlier version and run a Zotero refresh. If do not get a warning about unlinked citations at that point, it means that some edit in between your current version and that previous version caused the citations to unlink.
  • alexafh
    Just to be clear, I fixed all the citations, linked them back to Zotero, resolved all errors, and it unlinked them again within a day. I don't think that's a version control issue.
  • adomasven
    No, it's not a version control issue. But you should be able to figure out what changes to the document caused the citations to unlink by looking at Google Docs version history. It could be Zotero causing it (although that is extremely unlikely), or something else - other plugins you have, you or someone else editing the document in a peculiar way or other. Unless you can figure out what caused them to unlink we are unable to help you.
  • adamsmith
    It's not "a version control issue" -- Google Docs have automated versioning and if you want to help figure out *why* the citations keep unlinking (because that's not, obviously, the general behavior of the add-on), tracking down exactly *when* they do is the best way to do that. Google's versioning helps with that.
  • alexafh
    At this point I've made significant changes to the document, and it sounds like reverting very far back and then copy-pasting new edits back in may also cause Zotero to unlink in Google Docs (?), so unless there's another way to fix the unlinking, I think it's no longer possible to do reference management with Zotero for this project. Reverting to old documents via version control is not exactly a bug fix...
  • adamsmith
    This isn't try to bug-fix, it's bug searching.
    No one knows what's going on because it's only (or almost only) happening to you, so the only way the bug will get fixed is if you help to establish exactly what the bug is. This could be an add-on compatibility issue, it could be something particular to your document, it could be an unusual operation you use in google docs, or something else entirely, but since you're the only one seeing it, you're the only one who can help figure it out.
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