Refreshing Word 2010 doc appears to lose biblio refs from collapsed outline sections

I have many references in my bibliography in my paper I wrote in Word 2010. I like to use outline view in Word, but when I clicked Zotero's Refresh button, my references seemed to disappear. By that I mean that the one citation I was looking at had had a high number, but after clicking Refresh, it assumed number 1. It was as if the Zotero had lost all my preceding citations, which of course was very worrisome.

After much experimentation I discovered that they weren't really gone, but because most of the citations were in outlined sections that I had previously collapsed in Word, Zotero apparently could not detect them. If I expanded all the preceding sections so they were not hidden by Word's outlining feature, and again clicked Refresh, the citations below them were renumbered correctly.

I have a small, sample Word 2010 that can illustrate this phenomenon. This bug occurs with both Zotero 5.0.57 and 5.0.59. I am not sure you can even fix this, but even a clear warning or explanation, preferably given when Refreshing in Outline View, or at least easily Google-able, would help.
  • Report ID 635909119

    With Track changes off but previous changes still visibly marked up, and in Outline View, I noticed that the colored (marked up) changes temporarily disappeared during the Refresh. However, if and only if outline sections with citations were collapsed above my editing point, then Refresh still seemed to stop recognizing their existence, and began renumbering the citations beginning at "1" at the first uncollapsed citation. There was no visible attempt to temporarily uncollapse sections for the Zotero Refresh that I noticed.

    Perhaps you could, in addition to temporarily switching out of showing markup, also temporarily switch out of outlining during Refresh. I notice when I use Word's Find feature in Outline View, it finds words in previously collapsed sections and uncollapses those sections. So Word users expect for operations to not ignore collapsed sections, and if necessary uncollapse them.

    Thanks so much! We love Zotero!
  • Just to verify, are the numbers underlined or no?
  • When I do the change with Track Changes turned on, the new citation number, 1, ends up being underlined and the old number (4 in my small demo file) ends up with a strike-line through it. Both are in red and in brackets.

    With Track Changes off, the old citation number 4 disappears and is replaced by 1. Neither are underlined or struck through, and both are black.

    With the top outline section expanded, the citation does not change, but the bibliography is replaced which is noticeable with Track Changes turned on in which case the single black bibliography is replaced by two bibliographies, both red, one underlined, and one struck-through. Accepting all changes, then repeating the procedure repeats the replacement of the bibliography, end notes in the case of the sample doc.

    The brackets come from my choice of the journal, Life, as the style. Citations are stored as fields, the recommendation from Zotero in Word.
  • We've never had this reported, thanks for detailed troubleshooting. I've created a ticket for it. It is not very high priority, but we will post here when it is fixed eventually.
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