A reference not in the document keeps being in the reference list

I probably had this text as a reference at some point in my word document, but it has been long gone. I have also removed it from my Zotero (as far as I know).

But it is still in among the references, and I can't remove it.

Any suggestions on how to remove it, and any hints on why it keeps on being there.
  • Okay, nobody, that is not good.

    I decided to do what was necessary to kill it off. So no solution just a work around.

    First back into the backups, finding the spot where I used to have that reference. Cutting that part from the actually working document and paste it into a new document.

    Trying to figure out where that reference was hiding - it was not in any of the reference, it was not in the text, but somehow in the whole package.

    Took the text out and into Notepad. Copied back from Notepad to my original document. Inserted the references once again (I used most copy/paste for this as I already knew they were clean).

    And done.

    Sometimes Word can be very puzzling.
  • Sorry for lack of reply earlier. Must have missed the post. Glad you figured it out.

    The issue was probably an incompletely deleted citation. There was no text remaining to display, but all the metadata was still in your document. If you had an idea where the reference was inserted in the text, you could have toggled field codes (assuming you're using MS Word) via Alt+F9 and then deleted the left-over invisible data.
  • edited July 21, 2015
    Yes, you are right (once again I had a backup that ... well I had deleted it, but I was able to revive it ;-) ).

    I didn't that ALT+F9 had become useful as I am former WordPerfect shark so I have been missing something like that for years, and there it was the hanging code. So next time I can fix things much faster, thanks.
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