Manual corrections in word document don't save

frucat
Hi, I'm working on a document in which I'm needing to correct and manually add some citations in my word document. I'm making the changes directly in word and then saving the document. However, the citations are reverting back to how they appear in my library. Manually added citations are disappearing. How do I stop this? I need the corrections to save!
  • bwiernik
    How exactly are you making changes and where? To in-text citations? To the bibliography? What changes are you making?
  • frucat
    I have saved some pdf's to my zotero library from different websites. I completed an intext citation from the library which also drops the citation to my references. But they are not complete. So I have edited them directly in the word document to correct the formatting in both the in-text citation as well as in the reference list. I save the document. The next time I open the document the reference citation has reverted back to the one in zotero. The in-text citation has remained as edited.

    I also manually entered a reference for a book, so it is not in my zotero library. Saved the document. When I returned to the document the reference had disappeared. The in-text citation remained.

    Hope that clarifies the issue. It's a bit frustrating.

    BTW, I tried editing the zotero source in my library, but pdf documents from a website don't allow for the same editing as a journal article for example, at least not that I can find. If I could figure out how to correct the citation in the library it would solve the problem I think.
  • adamsmith
    Yeah, don't do this. If you must edit the bibliography you can do this by clicking "Edit Bibliography" but it at that point you're losing all types of functionality, including importantly the ability of the bibliography to automatically update so generally I'd recommend just not doing that ever. In the worst case you can do this in a finalized copy of the document after removing Zotero field codes.

    What you want to do is indeed fix the items in Zotero proper. You can use https://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata on the PDFs and if that doesn't work, right-click --> Create Parent item on the PDF and input the data manually. You'll have to recite the items in your document (i.e. delete the old citation and insert new ones.
  • frucat
    edited July 6, 2017
    I've tried the metadata retrieval for the pdf's and it tells me the content is unavailable. I'll change the information manually and reinsert the citations.
    Thanks for the help.
  • frucat
    That worked, thanks!
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