The numbers on my citations are in desending order

Vrands · June 7, 2012

This morning a installed firefox 13, zotero 3.0.7 and the word for windows 3.1.7 add-in. I started a new document, picked a citation style and started typing. Each time I add a citation that citation becomes #1 and the previous citations take on a new number so they are in an inverse order. I switched to a different citation style and that did not help.

Vrands · June 7, 2012

It gets worse. I started a new document and this time it wants to put all the citations from the whole document in chronological order. Meaning the numbers jump everywhere.

adamsmith · June 7, 2012

which styles are these?

Vrands · June 7, 2012

American Physiology Society - Renal and Regulatory

fbennett · June 7, 2012

This is a custom style? I don't see it in the repository.

Vrands · June 7, 2012

No they are both from your repository. American Physiology Society also called APS has may journals one is Renal, and one is Regulatory and Comparative. I installed both from your list.

adamsmith · June 7, 2012

I can't say whether that's correct for all journals you tried, but the style for the American Physiological Society requires sorting by author, which explains the behavior you're seeing:
http://www.the-aps.org/mm/Publications/Preparing-Your-Manuscript#references
"Reference lists should be arranged alphabetically by author and numbered serially. The reference number should be placed in parentheses at the appropriate place in the text."

fbennett · June 7, 2012

Looking at the APS style, it's designed to work that way. The bibliography is sorted by author, then by date. The bibliography entries are numbered in sequence, and the sequence numbers are used for referencing in the text of the document.

The APS style guide says this:

Reference lists should be arranged alphabetically by author and numbered serially.

This conflicts with the example that they give, but the Zotero style follows the stated rule, so as far as I can tell this is correct.

Vrands · June 7, 2012

All science journals number serially, just like it says. So in the text the first citation is 1 then 2 then 3. etc. What I am getting is the last one add on say page 5 becomes number 1 and then everything else changes so that insted of assending numbers I have descending numbers. I have used Zotero since version 1. I have used the APS citation styles before, I have never hand these issues. I uninstalled and reinstalled both the zotero and the word plug in and the problem is still there. I really appreciate your help. Unfortunately I didn't get anything accomplished today because of this issue.

adamsmith · June 7, 2012

They style also corresponds to what they do in their journals, so it looks like everything is working as it should.

Vrands · June 7, 2012

Finally, Im not sure why but one more restart and now everything seems to be okay. Thank you again.

adamsmith · June 7, 2012

Vrands -

All science journals number serially, just like it says. So in the text the first citation is 1 then 2 then 3. etc.

that's incorrect. Most science styles do that, but not APS, at least not in the journals I checked.
See e.g. Cell Physiology:
http://ajpcell.physiology.org/content/298/1/C38.full.pdf
the first three citations in this article are 1,8,20 (and that it starts with 1 is pure coincidence). This is the style currently required by APS journals. I think it's stupid, you may think so, too, but it's what they want so it's what Zotero is going to produce.
It's very well possible that this was fixed and some point in the past and we didn't use to do this correctly.

fbennett · June 7, 2012

I checked the log files for the style, and it has been set up to handle sorting and numbering in this way since the advent of the current repository on GitHub.

(As an aside on a separate issue, testing with the style turned up a small bug in the processor that could cause in-text citation numbers to fail to update (i.e. not the behavior you are describing, which does not seem to be a bug). I'm not sure whether this small bug would affect current Zotero, but you can check by refreshing the document. If citation numbers are corrected by the refresh, you'll want to be sure to refresh before finalizing a document. The bug has now been fixed, and the new processor version will appear in a future Zotero release.)