Why does Zotero randomly scramble in-text citations?

CEIW20
When annotating an article, adding citations as I have done before and compiling a bibliography, I found that Zotero moved in-text citations around in the document, resulting in a complete scramble. Also, references disappeared entirely from the bibliography.

I am working in Word 2011 on a Mac. Does anyone have any idea what is going on here? If this carries on, Zotero is a liability...
  • Simon
    This is definitely not supposed to happen, and I don't think that it's a general issue. One way you can absolutely mess up your document is by deleting or moving fields while Zotero is updating it (i.e., while the progress bar is present after adding or editing a citation).

    If you didn't do this, it might help to know more about your document settings (e.g., are you using in-text citations or footnotes, fields or bookmarks). Additionally, you should make sure you have the latest version of Word for Mac integration (3.5.5 at the time of this writing).
  • fbennett
    edited July 30, 2012
    If you have a copy of the document in its state before the error, set aside a copy; the developers may want to take a look at it, or at debugging output from a trigger of the fault.

    For repairing the production copy of the document, start with these steps.

    (Edit: actually, what Simon writes above.)
  • adamsmith
    edited July 30, 2012
    Zotero doesn't typically do that - it's a sign of a corrupted document, which happens rarely, can usually be repaired, and is most often the result of doing something unusual in the document - afaik it happens much more easily when you're using bookmarks rather than word fields.

    You can run through these:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
    save a copy of the corrupted document, might be that Simon will want to take a look to see what's going on more precisely.

    edit: pfff - I wait for 50mins and then everyone writes within 30secs...
  • CEIW20
    Thanks all!

    I am using in-text citations, and there is definitely something fishy going on when editing those. What does seem to be the pattern is that existing in-text citations are shunted one step forward, and in some case this replaces what was there before.

    I will try all the steps above - and definitely check my version of Word for Mac integration.

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