Zotero bibliography does not appear in word document

Ipic
When I add a bibliography from the Zotero plugin, only {Bibliography} appears but no references. When I click on edit bibliography though, I can see the references selected?
How to see the complete bibliography in my document?
(Both Zotero and Word and the plugins have been updated to the latest versions...)
Thanks
  • adamsmith
    How big is the document in question? How long have you waited for the bibliography to appear?
  • adamsmith
    Though actually, if you are able to click Edit Bibliography and see items, something is broken. See if deleting the last bit of the document (maybe from the last period onward or so) helps. Also, try showing field codes https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes and see if you can see a sign of a (hidden) bibliography.
  • Ipic
    Indeed, I can edit the bibliography, why I also feel something is broken... The document in itself is pretty big (145 pages) but how the number of pages/deleting the last part would interfere with the ability to show the bibliography? Also, the latest part written is not at the end of the document. I waited, it just never appeared. Also restarted everything a couple times, still only {Bibliography} appears. Don't know what else I should do...
  • adamsmith
    Did you read& try the rest of my post?
  • Ipic
    Yes, tried showing and toggle field code, doesn't change anything
  • adamsmith
    The idea was not just to toggle them, but then to look for the problem, i.e. a bibliography that isn't being shown.
  • adomasven
    Do you have any active citations in the document? Try inserting one just above the {Bibliography} field and see if it appears.
  • Ipic
    edited March 28, 2017
    Believe it or not, finding the problem was my intention by writing in this forum!
    I didn't have any citation, so I inserted one and Word told me the link for the bibliography was corrupted and had to change the field code. The bibliography did appear after that! But if I delete the citation though, and edit the bibliography, it is gone again. At least I can work with it like this, thanks adomasven!
  • PeterJLor
    Apology if this is hopelessly naive: when I'm trying to insert a big bibliography (several thousand items) it would help me if I knew whether something was happening or not. Is there some way to tell that Zotero is chugging through it? Or could some symbol or icon be added to show that it's busy? I don't mind if it takes a looong time, as long as I know. Thanks!
  • bwiernik
    A better progress indicator is planned for the short-to-medium term for the Word processor plugins. For the moment, if you switch to the Zotero window and find that it is processing something (perhaps shown as "Not responding"), you can infer that it is inserting and formatting the bibliography. When inserting a bibliography with several thousand references, this will take a very long time, but Zotero will not likely crash or stop working in the interim.
  • PeterJLor
    Thank you, bwiernik, I'll look out for this in future.

    To encourage others daunted by the prospect of producing a big bibliography, I can report as follows. (This was done before I saw your reply.)

    I worked on 3-year old desktop with an i3 Intel Core 4150 processor (3,5GHz) with a 3MB cache, a 1GB graphics card, 4 GB DDR3 memory, 500 GB hard drive and 128 GB SSD, where my software resides. I'm not very knowledgeable but don't think this is a particularly powerful machine.

    As a trial run I tried to produce a bibliography (about 950 items at this stage) for six chapters (130,000 words) of a monograph I'm working on. I made test copies of my chapters, deleted the chapter bibliographies, and then used the "insert text from file" function in Word to add the chapters one by one to Chapter 1. Having done this, I clicked on Zotero's "Refresh" button, thinking this might help speed up the process of disambiguating the references with same author/date and authors with same family names. (I'm using the Chicago author-date system.) Nothing seemed to happen. After about an hour I clicked on "Insert bibliography". Nothing happened. I waited for several hours but no bibliography appeared. This is when I first posted my query. I left the computer on overnight, but it went to sleep so this morning there was still nothing. Then I tried "Refresh" again (don't know whether this serves any purpose), waited half an hour, and then clicked on "Insert bibliography". This time, a 26,000 word bibliography appeared after about 10-15 minutes.

    I don't know whether this was the result of my earlier attempt, or a response to my second attempt, but I'm mighty pleased with the result. Not only did it produce a consistently formatted bibliography, but it disambiguated the references as needed throughout the text -- a job which would take days of work if done manually. (Of course, I expect there will be some anomalies to sort out in the course of a thorough final check.)

    I now feel confident that I'll be able to do the same with the final product, which will run to around 180,000 words.

    Thanks and Kudos to the Zotero team. As we say in South Africa, Viva Zotero! Long live!



  • PeterJLor
    Returning to my comment of 6 June 2017, is there any hope that we can get a basic indicator to tell us when a large bibliography is being compiled? I'm working on a large book project and when I ask Zotero to create the bibliography, nothing seems to happen. Bwiernik mentioned that "a better progress indicator" is planned, which implies that there is a progress indicator already. I switched to the Zotero window as suggested but I can't find any evidence that anything is happening. Can you be more specific about where I should look?

    I realize that my bibliography will take some time, and I'm prepared to wait for it, but it would make life so much easier if there were a simple work-in-progress indicator to confirm, "yes, your bibliography is being created, please be patient". It doesn't have to be a sophisticated progress indicator. Then I can get on with other work while Zotero chugs away through my text. Please, and thanks!
  • PeterJLor
    A work in progress indicator has appeared! This is really helpful. Thank you!
This discussion has been closed.