bibliography corrupted (authors appear in different articles than they should)

flodlan
Dear Zotero-ists,

I have made a troubling discovery recently, which is that all my bibliographic information stored in Zotero became unreliable. :-(
Several of my bibliographic fields have the wrong author assigned to an item. For example, I would have:
* Dale, M; Craig, S. Nature 1990. ..

Which has become:
* Dale, M; Leopold, W. Nature 1990..

So the author has been replaced by an author that belonged to a different record. I'm afraid I will have to start all over from scratch and delete all my records, because I don't know which to trust anymore. Do you have any idea how this could have happened? How to avoid it? Can it be because I (accidentally) left Firefox open on both my computers? I am using Zotero 1.5 sync..

Thanks for any feedback!

an enthousiastic but slightly worried Zotero-user.
  • alandsloane
    There are fairly explicit warnings that you shouldn't rely solely on Sync Preview, and that you should back up your database regularly if trying it. I've been keeping simple copies of the zotero directory, and also exported everything to RDF.

    You could try using SQLite Manager to inspect the structure of the database and see if you can fix it up - from what you say it doesn't seem to be corrupt, just that an author ID has gone astray.

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