Zotero Microsoft Word Plug-in adding erroneous page numbers

paulsme2

I have been having this problem for quite a while now. I have mac OS 10.13 (old I know) and several of my citations have "p. 1" added to them even though that is not even the page number listed in the page field of the citation. I do not want the page number in my citations, so I do not know why they are there in the first place. What could be causing this?

adamsmith

Which citation style?
When you click on edit citation with the cursor in the citation, then click on the blue/grey field with the citation, do you see "1" in the "Page" field of the citation details (see https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#customizing_cites )

paulsme2

It actually doesn't matter which citation style, certain references always do that. I see that if I edit the customized citations, it removes the page number. But I do not understand how that page number got there in the first place.

Also while I'm here, Zotero has issues with journal abbreviations. For some reason they are not automatically imported leaving me a headache of manually annotating hundreds of citations.

adamsmith

You didn't quite answer my question, though: is there a 1 in the Pages field?

For journal abbreviations: you realize you don't need the field in Zotero populated? Zotero will just generate them automatically from the journal title as needed.

paulsme2

It is not. In the actual citation itself, the page number is, for example, 1373, but the customizable edit option in the blue/grey field says 1. I still don't know how it got there!

For journal abbrev, a lot of my citations are populated with the full journal name. Not sure why this happens either. Example, Publication = Current Opinion in Biotechnology, abbreviation = Current Opinion in Biotechnology. Maybe this is a journal website issue?

adamsmith

Sorry, we're talking past each other:
The Zotero item has a Pages field. That is only rarely used in citations (pretty much exclusively in footnotes/endnote) and only appears in the bibliography.

Every citation Zotero inserts into Word has an optional locator, which defaults to Page. What I'm asking you is if the 1 appears there when you look at it by clicking on the citation -- and I think you're saying that it does.

The most likely reason this would happen is that Zotero will interpret some things that you type in the red citation bar as page numbers. So if you type, e.g., "Smith" and then select and then start typing the year but stop after the 1 because you already have an item selected, that could happen. I don't see another way this would occur.

adamsmith

For the journal abbreviations -- which citation style? And if you check the Document Preferences, do you have "Automatically abbreviate journal titles" checked?

paulsme2

Interesting bug with the page field. As for the journal abbrev, thank you for the tip! I didn't know this was an option. Now I don't have to manually edit the citations. Thank you.

dstillman

I'm not sure what you think is a bug. There's no bug described above. Being able to add page numbers by typing into the citation dialog is a feature, and there shouldn't be any mystery about it — it shows "p. 1" in the bubble as soon as you press Return and will show "1" in the Page field if you open the popup by clicking on the bubble.

paulsme2

I can assure you I would not have ever meant to do this and the fact it happened with numerous citations was a little bit strange. I am glad I can fix it easily

dstillman

Right, but "bug" has a specific meaning — it means the software isn't working as designed. Being able to just type a number after the name to quickly assign a page number using only the keyboard is a documented feature, not a bug.

If you can reproduce a problem with something not working correctly, you'd report that as a bug. It sounds like this was just your being unaware of a feature of the citation dialog.