Changing citation style mass-deletes my citations

greggor.mattson
A journal article I am working on requires Chicago full-note style rather than the one I was using (American Sociological Association). It wasn't displaying the endnotes properly (numbers were in superscript without period after them, endnotes were in 10-pt font, no spaces between notes).

I downloaded and selected Frontiers in Psychiatry to see if it would correct the error. Instead, half of my endnotes have been deleted, and the remaining half have a date-time stamp (5/14/14 7:41 PM).

Of course the autosave file and my file backup are from the morning, before a full day's typing/editing.

I don't suppose there's any way to get my fields back? Pleez?

I'm using a Macintosh with Firefox 29.0.1 with Microsoft Word 2011 version 14.4.1, with Zotero 4.0.20.0
  • adamsmith
    did you try switching back to Chicago? (I'm a little confused also, since of course endnotes would disappear when switching to an author-date style like Frontiers, no?)

    or just try undo in Word?

    FWIW, the formatting of footnotes and endnotes isn't something that Zotero does; that's handled by Word.
  • greggor.mattson
    edited May 15, 2014
    Frontiers in Psychiatry is an endnote style as well (it just doesn't use superscript in-text citations, so was wrong).

    When I switched back to Chicago full-note, half the citations are gone (there were 127, now there are 54). The first 54 re-converted fine. The back 70-odd are ow in-line full citations, thus:

    feminist tradition of seeing the state as a devil’s bargain or double-edged sword,Hasso, “Bargaining with the Devil”; Kristin Luker, “Sex, Social Hygiene, and the State: The Double-Edged Sword of Social Reform,” Theory and Society 27, no. 5 (1998): 601–34. this gap in feminist work on the state was identified in a disappointed assessment: “gender scholars downplay the
  • adamsmith
    Frontiers in Psychiatry is an endnote style
    no, it's not. It's a numeric style, where every in-text number corresponds to a bibliography entry. Without inserting a bibliography you wouldn't see anything but the in-text numbers, so the initially "disappearing" citations could have just been that.

    I don't think we'll be able to troubleshoot exactly what happened, I don't recall anything of the kind being reported before. I'd suggest working from your back-up/autosave and copying over what you typed and edit, that can't be that bad, I think that's the best we're going to be able to do.
    As for how to prevent this in the future - I'm pretty sure undo would have gotten you back to the starting point. And if you do have troubles in the future, the quicker you ask for help here the better.
  • adamsmith
    The back 70-odd are ow in-line full citations, thus:
    oh, so if the citations are somehow there, that could still be salvageable. Try switching the style to footnotes under document preferences, that could work.
  • greggor.mattson
    Thanks for all your help. All your suggestions eventually restored them. I had a brief heart attack because the formatting of the footnotes was in symbols, but I've restored everything, and now I'll monkey with the formatting of the endnotes in Word.

    Thanks again for the speedy fixes!
  • nathalyamusa
    Hi everybody,

    My Zotero was working perfectly; I turned off my notebook and turned it on again and for my surprise there is ANY citation style on it. For this reason I can do my references for my thesis. I am desperate now because it suppose to be done in the next 18 hours. Does anybody have an idea?

    Regards.
  • adamsmith
    I assume you mean "there isn't any citation style". Where are you looking? Have you tried installing a new one from http://zotero.org/styles ?
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