Smith 2009a, Smith 2009b

After exporting (all data after exporting was deleted from Zotero) and re-importing bibliography to Zotero, inserting same Smith, 2009 reference appears as Smith, 2009a, however Smith for 2009 has only one reference in Zotero.

Can you help to solve the problem?

D.
  • edited December 19, 2011
    What OS, and what Zotero and Firefox versions are you using? Also, is this in an old document (from before the export and delete), or in a newly created document?
  • It's a bit odd to export everything and delete the content of the entire database (?), but that by itself should not cause exceptional problems (apart from destroying dynamic citation links in any documents created before the deletion operation).
  • Vista, 3.0b2.1, Chrome 16.0.912.63 m, Zotero WinWord Integration 3.1.2.r10115, old document content copy-pasted into a clean word document (as recommended in troubleshoot, since were problems with creating citation list).
  • Zotero 2.1.10? The beta uses a more recent version of the CSL processor, but we've not seen this behavior in any version so far. I'm not sure it's relevant, but have you emptied trash since the delete? Also (the last question I can think of) which style are you using?
  • edited December 19, 2011
    Zotero version 3.0b2.1 - thats precisely from 'About Zotero'

    I have emptied the trash.

    APA style.

    Here is what word 'toggle code' shows under a and b citations. There is only one reference currently in Zotero.
  • I have changed all references in the document to a plain text and then manually one-by-one added them again through Zotero.

    Although if you have a chance to look at this issue it would be great for the future work.

    Best,
    D.
  • edited December 19, 2011
    The "toggle code" details that you posted earlier (but now seem to have been removed) show two citations in the document with the same title ("Using Learning Outcomes"). If both are showing up in the document, then everything is working correctly; Zotero is just following the rules of the style, and adding the a and b so that the references can be distinguished in the bibliography.

    Earlier, you suggested there was only one cite in the document:
    After exporting (all data after exporting was deleted from Zotero) and re-importing bibliography to Zotero, inserting same Smith, 2009 reference appears as Smith, 2009a, however Smith for 2009 has only one reference in Zotero.
    If that's not the case, it looks like there isn't a problem ... ?
  • Toggle codes showed interpretation of Zotero of one single citation before and after library export-import. The problem is that Zotero considered one citation as being two different. This lead to a and b suffixes and later to #error message when any further manipulation attempted.
  • It's not completely clear what you were doing, but if the entries for either or both of those items were deleted from the Zotero database, that would cause an error in any case. Ordinarily you should only delete entries that are no longer needed (in 3.0 you can use merging to combine duplicates, to avoid deletions in that case).
  • (If there are problems here that I have missed, they are not related to the CSL processor, so I'll bow out now.)

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