Upgrade StorageError when supressing author name in citation in Word
Hey there,
for months I have gotten the error
"Zotero experienced an error updating your document. The range cannot be deleted. [setText:field.cpp]"
when I try to insert a citation with the author name suppressed and no page numbers available (like in an online newspaper article).
Using Word from Office 365.
Any ideas on how to fix that are greatly appreciated!
Thanks a lot,
Julia
for months I have gotten the error
"Zotero experienced an error updating your document. The range cannot be deleted. [setText:field.cpp]"
when I try to insert a citation with the author name suppressed and no page numbers available (like in an online newspaper article).
Using Word from Office 365.
Any ideas on how to fix that are greatly appreciated!
Thanks a lot,
Julia
As I work with large documents, I have gotten into the habit of refreshing manually to simply safe time. Do you think there is any other way to have it work without the automatic update?
Not sure if your second question asks if the error only comes up if I enable automatic updates after I added a quotation and not right at the beginning?! Well, if I insert a first citation in a new document with automatic updates activated, all is fine. When I then enable automatic updates and try to insert a second quotation, the error happens.
no updates available :(
Not sure if that is of help, still wanted to share.
A placeholder in the case of disabled automatic updates is probably better.
Unfortunately, I have quite a lot of citations where I mention the author's name in the text and there are no page numbers or anything...so I will try APA and hope for the best when switching.
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5282/multiple-in-text-citation-patterns
I assume that @julia.tiemann is using this approach in order to (1) avoid parentheses, and (2) still add the reference to the bibliography.
We aren't supposed to manually edit the cites, but also can't automatically create one without parentheses.
A "suppress parentheses" (e.g., cite-prefix-and-suffix) option would solve this, as would the proposal I've been advocating in that thread: name-only cites.
--
If you desperately want an awkward solution to this, you could try my approach here:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73159/announcing-zoterzero-for-author-only-cites
It would require rewriting the macro search/replace a bit, so that for MLA just the parentheses are removed from around the name, but that's relatively easy to do.
However, speaking as someone using that solution now, I'd instead recommend @adomasven 's suggestion of temporarily using APA, if that works for you. It will work more smoothly and require less effort from you (especially to set up).
Note: since not all of the background is explained above, I should clarify that my comments here most relevantly only apply if you actually need name-only (implying "empty") cites, rather than, for example, name plus a page number in parentheses.
Sorry if I've misinterpreted the conversation here!
--
Replying to edit: That's awkward though because they don't trace back to a location in the original paper, so you Zotero's extremely helpful citation/bibliography matching functionality no longer works.
Yes, the simplest solution here would be to just add those papers via Edit Bibliography, but it wouldn't associated them with particular sentences, as @julia.tiemann seems to be trying to do. (Still might be the better solution at the moment, given technical limitations. But those limits are specifically that name-only cites are not allowed.)
Sorry if their are some ambiguities in my line of reasoning; as a non-native speaker of English it's sometimes hard to express myself clearly, especially in this field of software programming I barely have any knowledge of - sorry :)
The thing is, I remember back when I was writing my master's thesis in 2012, it was no problem to have "empty citations". I would refer to the author in text, and as it was the only work from that author I was citing in the whole document and there were no page numbers since it was an online article, I would supress the author so that the work still comes up in the works cited list. Since I was doing this in MLA style, there wouldn't be a year or something else. In text, no empty parantheses were coming up, just a grey single space when you went over it with the cursor. Quite genius and elegant, if you ask me. Never had any problems with that back then, so to me as an unkowing end-user, it's just annoying that this action creates error pop-ups now (:
Yes, that's exactly what I thought you were trying to do. Unfortunately there isn't a perfect way to do it.
The simplest is to do what @adomasven said in the last reply above: add uncited references in "Edit Bibliography".
But I completely agree with you it would be great to have more options available to cite things in text. I have no idea what changed, but I also agree with @adomasven that now using "empty" cites is not a good/reliable method, so I hope one of the alternative suggestions above works for you!
But that's no worse than your approach in 2012, if you were just typing the names out then anyway.
(A more flexible solution requires something like the macro in my linked answer above, but it's technically complex to set up, so I don't recommend it unless this is especially important to you. On the other hand, you like me are writing a long dissertation, so maybe it is.)