Deleted citations continue to appear in bibliography

Gurdas_Sandhu
In my Word document, I had deleted some citations, but even when I refresh the bibliography, they continue to appear in the bibliography even though there are no 'visible' instances in the document. I was able to solve the issue, but would like to know what went wrong and if there is a better solution.

I had originally removed the citations by selecting the inserted in-line citation text and hitting 'delete' on my keyboard. This is probably not the right way and I should I have used Zotero's edit citations feature. I noticed the problem when I switched from an author-date style to a numbered style, and saw that some citations had inexplicable numbers, such as 196, while there are only 40 odd references. Of the 196, 19 is highlighted like field codes are, 6 is not. In the numbered bibliography, the correct reference is number 19, but the ghost reference, which I had deleted, is number 16. Same pattern with three other instances involving different references.

I used the alt-F9 feature to show codes and deleted the codes for the ghost citations. Now, when I refresh the bibliography, the not-cited items are gone. SO, all looks fine for the moment. What did I do wrong and how should it (ideally) be fixed?
  • dstillman
    I had originally removed the citations by selecting the inserted in-line citation text and hitting 'delete' on my keyboard. This is probably not the right way
    No, that is the right way. You just have to be sure to delete the whole field when deleting the citation. Make sure you have field shading enabled in Word, which makes this less error-prone.
  • Gurdas_Sandhu
    Thanks, Dan. The highlight field feature is handy.

    I wonder if something got left out when I was deleting. The existing style uses author-date within parenthesis. I think I had deleted everything including the parenthesis, else the remnants would be easily identifiable. But may be I did not. Can anything else cause the issue I had?

    Does it matter if the whole citation is deleted in one go (select then delete) or I can also simply place my cursor and keep hitting backspace until it is all deleted?

    What if there are more than one citations in the same place and I wish to delete only some of them? I know I can use the edit citation function. But, can I just delete the one I need to from my keyboard?
  • adamsmith
    Does it matter if the whole citation is deleted in one go (select then delete) or I can also simply place my cursor and keep hitting backspace until it is all deleted?
    doesn't matter, no.
    What if there are more than one citations in the same place and I wish to delete only some of them? I know I can use the edit citation function. But, can I just delete the one I need to from my keyboard?
    no, you'll want to use edit citation for that. I believe otherwise the whole citation will stop updating, which is particularly annoying in a numbered style, of course.
  • Cathryne
    Same/Similar problem in LibreOffice 4.4.03 with the Zotero integration plugin 3.5.9 and I found a reproducible crash additionally.

    Whenever LO's "Track..." and "Show changes" options are on, deleted entries are not dropped from the refreshed bibliography, but from the reference counting. See this example doc: https://volafile.io/r/Ui2uHN or http://ge.tt/5PMQqCA2/v/0.

    So far so known, but when I now switch off "Show changes" and refresh the bibliography, the following error appears:


    Zotero experienced an error updating your document.

    An error occurred communicating with Zotero:
    com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException: End of content node doesn't have the proper start node
    at com.sun.star.bridges.jni_uno.JNI_proxy.dispatch_call(Native Method)
    at com.sun.star.bridges.jni_uno.JNI_proxy.invoke(JNI_proxy.java:179)
    at com.sun.proxy.$Proxy16.createTextCursorByRange(Unknown Source)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.ReferenceMark.setText(ReferenceMark.java:157)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.CommMessage.execute(CommMessage.java:127)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.CommMessage.getBytes(CommMessage.java:40)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.CommServer.run(CommServer.java:60)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
    'An error occurred communicating with Zotero:
    com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException: End of content node doesn't have the proper start node
    at com.sun.star.bridges.jni_uno.JNI_proxy.dispatch_call(Native Method)
    at com.sun.star.bridges.jni_uno.JNI_proxy.invoke(JNI_proxy.java:179)
    at com.sun.proxy.$Proxy16.createTextCursorByRange(Unknown Source)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.ReferenceMark.setText(ReferenceMark.java:157)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.CommMessage.execute(CommMessage.java:127)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.CommMessage.getBytes(CommMessage.java:40)
    at org.zotero.integration.ooo.comp.CommServer.run(CommServer.java:60)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
    ' when calling method: [zoteroIntegrationField::setText]
  • Cathryne
    PS: Continues to happen after deactivating the "Store references in document"-functionality.
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