Zotero ignores its own citations?

dainaesposito
Hi all,

I have about a hundred citations in a document, all done in Zotero, but when I try to add a new one it ignores them and starts over at 1. I have not unlinked anything, but I had to merge comments from collaborators and that seems to have started the trouble.

I tried accepting changes which made my computer stop crashing every time I touched the zotero tab, but I would rather not start over again on the citations.

Advice for Zotero 5.0.41 with Word 15.37 on a Mac (and/or recommendations for less obnoxious reference management programs) would be appreciated.
  • adomasven
    Your collaborators either edited the document in an editor that does not support Fields (e.g. Google Docs or an older version of LibreOffice/OpenOffice) or you have disabled automatic citation updates in the document preferences (check under Zotero Tab).
  • adamsmith
    (I'd also update Zotero and Word)
  • dainaesposito
    So...should I just go buy Endnote rather than redoing all of my citations every time I need feedback? I have not disabled automatic citation updates and my collaborators work in standard word documents. No way to recover here?
  • adamsmith
    Endnote (and most other reference managers) uses the same technology, Word Fields, to store citation linkages in documents, so if those are indeed gone, the same would likely have happend with other software.

    One thing to check, one thing to look to for a workaround:
    1. If you press alt+Fn+F9 (which shows field codes in Word) do you actually not see anything around the old citations?

    2. Word has a compare document function. If you still have a version of the document before sending to collaborators, you can use that function to merge the changes into the document that still has live citations.
  • dainaesposito
    Thanks for your efforts. The weird thing is that is knows there are field codes for about half of them and wants to convert them into the full text of the citation in the text, but then the whole thing either crashes or just gives up.

    Merging the changes in the compare function is what made the trouble start. I just checked, and the references were flipped to Zotero AFTER they had hands on it, so it was my merging their changes into my Zotero document that broke it.
  • adamsmith
    The weird thing is that is knows there are field codes for about half of them and wants to convert them into the full text of the citation in the text, but then the whole thing either crashes or just gives up.
    ah OK, that's different then. That does sound like a broken/corrupted document. I'd guess that merging in the changes somehow contributed to that, but hard to say.
    If you run through https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents that would a) likely allow you to fix this and b) if you're able to isolate a small portion of the document that causes the problem, you can send that to support@zotero.org for adomasven to take a look & see what's going on.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited April 11, 2018
    When a student (or a colleague) sends me a draft of their report for review I refuse to accept it if field codes are intact. The round-trip damaged document problem encountered by @dainaesposito is common. Apart from the risk of damage to the document simply by my opening and saving it, I prefer to make in-text changes and comments to a clean document. My preference is to receive a pdf version.

    I wonder if the Zotero documentation should be revised to more strongly recommend the practice of sending a _copy_ of the working document instead of the active document. It occurs to me that it might be useful to add a button to the Zotero Word (or LibreOffice) interface that would automatically save a copy of the working document stripped of field codes. This copy could have an in-text label to demonstrate that it is without field codes. It could also include a date/time stamp to help with version control.
  • adamsmith
    (let's keep this thread focused on solving the OP's issue)
  • DWL-SDCA
    For the record, my comments are intended to help with _preventing_ the OP from encountering the problem in the future. It also makes a recommendation that might prevent this common problem from affecting any user. I had no intention to commandeer the thread.

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