Lost citations

rchernick
I was working on a paper earlier today, had no problem connecting my Word document citations/bibliography to my Zotero library. When I reopened the document several hours later, all of my citation links were gone. Can't seem to find them again. Ideas?
  • dstillman
    When I reopened the document several hours later, all of my citation links were gone.
    Could you explain what you mean by that?
  • adamsmith
    So the citations are still there but they don't link to Zotero anymore or something else?

    If that's it, which Word version and in what format did you save the document? Also, did you open it in any other software -- google drive, Pages, LibreOffice -- in between?
  • rchernick
    They are still there, but don't link anymore. When I select the citation in the Word document, I used to see a darkened area where the citation was, when I clicked on that and hit edit, I would get linked to Zotero. But now that is no longer happening.
    I'm using Word 14.6.0. Did not open it anywhere else in the meantime, or add or delete or make changes to any other programs.
  • adamsmith
    if you move your cursor inside one of the citations and click "Edit Citation" in the Zotero for Word toolbar, do you get an error message or does the citation come up?

    And how about the file format question -- what format (.doc, .docx, .rtf, something else) did you save this as?
  • rchernick
    I rebooted the whole computer and each individual program (Zotero and Word) a few times but that did not help.
  • rchernick
    I tried editing a citation, but if I put the cursor in a citation and hit edit, it says "you must place the cursor in a citation in order to edit it".
    I'm saving in .docx which I believe is what it's been saved as since I started writing the document.
  • adamsmith
    I got nothing. This shouldn't be possible and I don't think I've heard of this happening without some other explanation before (unless you clicked the "Remove Zotero Field Codes" button -- but that would have given a warning and also, why would you have).

    Can you reproduce this with a new document? I.e. just insert citations, save, close Word, reopen and see if the citations are still there?
  • rchernick
    OK, I'll try creating a new document. I know, it's totally puzzling. And sort of freaking me out. Hours and hours of work to add those citations again for a 65 page document.

    My only other thought was the file is saved on Dropbox (but has been since the beginning). On one of the other threads, I noticed someone mentioned that Dropbox could be problematic?
  • rchernick
    OK, it's now saving the citations again! No problem!
    But the old ones are all gone...
  • adamsmith
    I can't really see how it would be for documents, though with Dropbox, you could maybe check if there's a prior version to go back to to save your work?
    The problem w Dropbox is when you save your database on there. What I _could_ see is that DB now has Word 365 integration and if you use that (actively) that could potentially cause this, though I don't think anyone has tested.
  • rchernick
    OK, so I tried to open a copy from yesterday that was saved on my Desktop Mac on my Time Machine. The citations in that document are also gone! Which makes me think it's the Word program that is not reading the fields for some reason, since the documents were certainly saved in the Time Machine with the citation fields.
  • rchernick
    Am I missing some kind of "display fields" function or something? Are they there but I just can't see them, or they aren't activated?
  • adamsmith
    bizarre. I'm not aware of any such function in Word, no.
    How comfortable are you with computers? I could give you some instructions to try to look inside the .docx file in more detail to see if there's any trace of Zotero, but while it's not hard in any sense, it's not for the faint of heart, either -- let me know if you're interested (it's risk free apart from the time spent; you can't break anything).
  • rchernick
    OK, so after some more searching around, I DID find the citations in my Time Machine document from 12:56 but not from 1:56 today. So something must have gotten corrupted between those two times. But luckily, they are all still there, so I just have to update the 12:56 document with all of the work I did from 4:00 on, not so bad. But it still is mysterious, and it makes me nervous about using Zotero for further projects. Any time spent recovering lost material feels like a real bummer. It is possible, I guess that it was my error and not Zotero or Word, and I erased the fields by accident, although I would not have done that on purpose, of course, but maybe just in a moment of delirium? Anyway, thanks for you offer to delve deeper into this. I don't think I will need to do that this time and hopefully it won't happen again. Thanks for all your help with this!
  • dstillman
    The only way Zotero does this on its own is if you click Remove Field Codes and click through the warning. Otherwise, the fields are just Word fields — they're not related to Zotero on a technical level once they're in the document — so if they disappeared that would be from saving in a different file format, opening and resaving in another program, or some Word bug, but that would happen regardless of what program you were using to insert the fields.
  • dstillman
    One possible test here would be if you had any non-Zotero Word fields in the document in the previous version — for example, a date field. If so, you could see if those were also converted to plain text.
  • rchernick
    Thanks Dan and Adam for all your help! Seems like either a buggy Word issue or a buggy human (me) issue!
  • pjkwis
    Is it possible for the Zoerto field codes to be lost when a collaborator edits the document without the plug-in? I think that must have been what happened in my case. Is there any way to recover?
  • dstillman
    pjkwis: No, your collaborators don't need the plugin. This happens if the file is saved in an unsupported format — e.g., .rtf or .odt when using Word or .doc/docx when using LibreOffice.
  • Derv
    HI All.

    I'm having the same issue as discussed here. Using Word 2016. I have long document with approx 100 different citations all inserted with zotero. Yesterday I tried to insert a bibliography and only 5 works referenced were there. (these were the 5 most recently cited) I tried changing citation styles, and then saving as a new doc etc. and it just lost all connection - ie. when I tried to insert a bibliography again it had no references. And when I tried to edit a citation it brought up the preferences box, to choose a citation style as if this was the first citation in the document.

    Is there a solution to this? Any way to reconnect? Is this a Word 2016 issue?
    Thanks
  • adamsmith
    There's likely no solution to fix this post-hoc, unfortunately, no.

    As I suggested (to you I think?) on Twitter, there's two causes for this typically (apart from the Remove Field Codes button, which you say you didn't use).
    1. You opened & saved the document with another software. That could be Mac Pages, it could be LibreOffice, could be Google Docs (syncing with Drive is fine).
    2. Using the same logic, you saved the document in an unsupported format. That could have been .rtf, or .odt when using "Fields" (the default).

    There is no known bug in Zotero/Word 2016 that would cause this, no.
  • Derv
    Hi Adam,

    Thanks for your reply. I didn't do either of those things. I save a copy of the file to a google drive, but I don't open it from there.

    I guess something has happened to the file, but I don't know what.
  • adamsmith
    And no one else is working with the file?
    When you press alt+F9 (alt+FN+F9 on a mac), no field codes show up around citations?
  • Derv
    I found the problem. Word seems to have somehow saved the file as a .odt. Even though I don't recall it coming up, I must have said yes to saving it in this file format. I'll be more careful with Word in future.

    Thanks for your help!
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