Changing document preferences not working

kelecable2
edited June 25, 2018
I use a system of Zotero 5, LibreOffice 6, and Scrivener.

I wasn't having any issues with this for years, but now it's not working in a weird way.

After using the RTF scan tool on an .odt, the citations in the document are converted from the zu: code to an author-date citations. Now, I need Chicago full note and when I click on "set document preferences" for this style and hit okay, I receive an error.

The error says: "Item 0 in the highlighted citation no longer exists in your Zotero database. Do you want to select a substitute item?"

This makes no sense to me because it initially does recognize the citation! But when I change the preferences, it suddenly does not know what citation it's referencing. I'm at a loss. I've tried reinstalling Zotero, LibreOffice, and the integration plug-in with no luck.

Edit: I've also tried with a much smaller document with a handful of citations and the problem remains.
  • adamsmith
    Zotero doesn't need to recognize the citations in your database for the conversion, so this isn't impossible.

    You're trying the conversion on the same computer where you wrote the document?
  • kelecable2
    Okay, so I tried a new document with a citation code that I pulled out of Zotero and it worked: when I set document preferences, the citation changed correctly. (For some reason though I had to disable and reenable the Zotero plugin because the buttons weren't responding.)

    I did change computers maybe half a year ago, so the document has a mix of being written before and after the new computer. Is there a way to resolve this?
  • adamsmith
    How did you move Zotero data between the two computers? Using either of the two options here: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/transferring_a_library this shouldn't happen.
  • kelecable2
    It's been long enough that I don't remember exactly, but I do sync my database so my assumption is that I used that method. Is there any way for me to check?
  • adamsmith
    And your current computer is fully synced I assume?

    I think the quickest thing to check is to take some of the citations in the failing document and find them in your current Zotero and then compare the scannable cite that's in the document with a newly created one and see if they differ.
  • kelecable2
    Okay, that worked. In one of my test documents, one of the four citation codes is different from what it used to be, apparently. Once I replaced it with the new code, it all formatted correctly.

    What's annoying though is that I needed to look at every citation to figure out which one it was, perhaps because it was one citation of three within the same set of brackets.

    Is there a way to figure out which ones changed? Or do you know why one of them changed but the other three remained the same?

    Than you for all the help.
  • bwiernik
    edited June 26, 2018
    What likely happened is one of these:
    1. You had duplicate items and deleted one, rather than merging. Always merge duplicate items to avoid this issue.
    2. You exported your library and re-imported some items, which would produce new item IDs

    If this happens again, I'd recommend trying to Set Document Preferences to see which reference specifically fails, rather than starting by comparing codes—should save you some time.
  • kelecable2
    edited June 26, 2018
    Okay, it turned out to be only a couple of citations. It was that initial three-source citation and how it made everything else look (all citations becoming "{Citation}") that really threw me off and confused me. Thank you for all the help!

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