Problem with citations "eating" text

scarl
I'm using the Zotero plugin with Word 2013, and I have a problem that I've never encountered before.

Basically, some of my citations, which I inserted in the usual way (using the toolbar), have extended themselves to encompass some of the text immediately before them. I can tell this because when I put the cursor in that text and click on "Edit citation", the citation field comes up for the citation that is immediately afterwards. The problem is that when I update those citations, the text that they apparently think is part of the citations gets deleted.

I can't figure out how to separate the citations from the text - I tried just adding another space, but that seems to get sucked into the citation as well. This is really problematic because I'm in the middle of writing a manuscript and therefore am updating things a lot, and I keep losing chunks of text every time I update a citation!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
  • aurimas
    edited November 13, 2014
    Does this happen in a new document? Was the citation inserted after the adjacent text was written? i.e. is it possible that the text that's getting "sucked in" actually got typed into the citation? If you toggle fields (Alt+F9) where does the adjacent text end up (screenshot here might be helpful. You can upload somewhere and link to it)
  • scarl
    Hi aurimas, thanks for the reply. Yes, the citations were (I think) always inserted after the adjacent text was written.

    I tried a brute-force fix by deleting and re-inserting citations, and it seemed to work. I was using Bookmarks instead of Fields, but when I switched to Fields in order to try out the Alt+F9 trick, I noticed that the space before every citation was deleted. Using Fields, though, it seems that if I add a space back in, it works correctly. I'll try to stick with Fields for now (maybe it was a problem with Bookmarks?), and hope it doesn't happen again.
  • aurimas
    We'll take a look, though I don't have access to Word 2013 atm. Can you confirm that this is reproducible with a new document?
  • scarl
    I'm not sure if I can reproduce the original problem exactly, because I'm not sure how I caused it in the first place! But what I can reproduce is, if I type a sentence in a new document, insert a citation at the end of it, then go back and add some more text before the citation, it behaves as though that text is part of the citation (in Bookmarks mode).

    So for example, I have:

    Here is some text (Russell, 2009).

    Then I want to add some more:

    Here is some text and I forgot this part (Russell, 2009).

    If I then put my cursor, say, in the word "forgot" and click "Edit citation", a dialog box comes up saying "You have modified this citation since Zotero generated it. Editing will clear your modifications. Do you want to continue?". If I click OK, it shows me the normal insert/edit citation box for Russell, 2009, but when I hit enter, the text I just added gets deleted.

    Hope that makes sense! If I switch to Fields mode and do the same thing, it doesn't happen.

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