Upgrade StorageWhat goes wrong? Converting footnotes (MLA) into in-text references (author-date)
Hey all,
I'm sorry if this is posted in in the wrong section.
We've eagerly adapted Zotero at our office, but we're struggling with one remaining thing. Using Microsoft Word, if we have an article with author-date (say, Harvard) referencing, and we want to convert this into MLA, it works perfectly, and all we need to do is change this in preferences. Zotero then converts the in-text references into footnotes.
However, the other way around does not work (author-date into MLA); it converts into author-date within the footnotes, but does not place the references themselves back into the main body of the text.
Are we perhaps missing something very obvious relating to Word?
Thank you a lot for your help!
I'm sorry if this is posted in in the wrong section.
We've eagerly adapted Zotero at our office, but we're struggling with one remaining thing. Using Microsoft Word, if we have an article with author-date (say, Harvard) referencing, and we want to convert this into MLA, it works perfectly, and all we need to do is change this in preferences. Zotero then converts the in-text references into footnotes.
However, the other way around does not work (author-date into MLA); it converts into author-date within the footnotes, but does not place the references themselves back into the main body of the text.
Are we perhaps missing something very obvious relating to Word?
Thank you a lot for your help!
Also, which MLA style? MLA doesn't typically use footnotes. We only have one legacy MLA style that does notes. All other ones are in-text.
The endnotes could be it. Do you think converting the endnotes into footnotes before changing preferences will fix it? (on a quick try, it doesn't seem to work)
1. Insert a single Harvard citation
2. Convert to MHRA, making sure to select footnotes (in the Set Document Prefs dialog) and OK.
3. Make sure citations are converted correctly
4. Convert back to Harvard
5. Make sure that's converted correctly.
If it's working on the test doc, move back to the larger "real" one.
https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
helps.
For 8/9, don't bother for the time being trying to isolate an individual issue. What I'm interested in is whether splitting the doc in half will have this work in one of them.
Good chance that something in 3-6 fixes this, though.
It seems at this stage it might be less time consuming to just copy the zotero references by hand from the footnote into the text. This is not ideal but it does fix the issue; when they're copied back into the main body text they start to behave again as they should and convert properly as well. That too might suggest it's something to do with the Word coding?
Zotero, of course, only converts Zotero-created footnotes.
Could those be interfering? (I imagine not, since inserting any new zotero references works perfectly; it's all the references that have gone through the footnote-endnote-footnote cycle that refuse to play along)
Last thing you could try (not high hopes though) is to change to some different styles: first, try a different footnote style, then switch to a numerical style and see if that displays in-text.