When you click the Open in My Library button in the citation for each item, does it take you to the same item?

When you edit the citation, if you click the blue bubble for the citation, you see the fields for page numbers, affixes, and that button.

See Customizing Cites here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage

Okay, so what that means is that the one without a button is an "orphan" citation that isn't linked with Zotero. This is likely because it was linked with an item in Zotero that you deleted, rather than merged (it could also be a version that was inserted by another author on the the document). In any case, just replace all of the instances of that version of the citation with citations to the one that is properly linked with Zotero.

Thanks for this - I am concerned this is just one instance when I noticed this problem. Are you working on a fix to identify unlinked citations automatically? It is concerning this could very easily go unnoticed.

It’s generally not a problem, as the document can generate references using the data embedded in the document. So I really wouldn’t worry too much here. And you should almost never end up with orphaned references at all in the course of normal Zotero usage.

There is not currently a function to identify orphaned citations.

@rmzelle Does Reference Extractor do this at all?

I do think we need to think about a proper solution for this. It comes up too often. The Word add-on is the right place for it -- it's unreasonably complicated for an external tool as Rintze points out.

I have concluded I should start at the top of my paper and check every citation to see whether it is linked or not. I originally took the entire paper off another computer that had a local DB on it; the fact that I pasted in some such paragraphs now looks like a red-herring; every citation in my paper needs checking because all the citations started out unlinked. At least now I know how to check; too bad it's all tedious though.

Given the large quantity of citations that are unlinked, it would be convenient if I could relink them en-masse, with a GUI similar to the Duplicate Items pane in Zotero Standalone.

Sometimes after deleting an unlinked citation, when I start replacing it, I am given a list of possible references based on the words I type into the Add/Edit Citation bar. I sometimes see two possible choices in the Cited section--one with the author's name, and the other without the author's name. The trick is that to insert the first linked citation, I need to select neither of those, and instead go down to the My Library section and select that one. For ensuing citations, I need to select the choice from Cited that includes the author's name. It took a little trial-and-error but I think I have figured out the workaround steps for now.

Yes, @adamsmith, a proper solution would be very convenient for me.
Thanks so much! :)

I third this sugggestion.

We really need to a solution that does the following:
1. identify unlinked citations
2. automatically re-link them to the knew library.
3. identifying citations that are linked but have been overwritten manually in word. THe underlying citation has something different stored than what is written in word.

I'm currently editing a paper (another person's) which has over 300 citations....figuring out which is linked and isn't is a nightmare

@michael.pinus: I'm not sure what sort of update you're looking for. There's no bug in Zotero here. If this happens, it's something that you or your collaborator is doing. From the sound of it, they might be inserting the same citations from their own library, which creates completely new citations with no connection to the existing ones, causing Zotero to need to disambiguate the items.

If you're working on the same document together and citing from your own personal libraries instead of a shared group library, you'd want to be sure to choose from the Cited section of the search results in the citation dialog for any existing citations rather than choosing from your library.

You can toggle Word field codes and look at the URLs in the code to see what's going on under the hood. If my guess is right, you'll see URLs from two different users/groups for citations that are being disambiguated.

@adamsmith: Sure — I'm not saying we can't improve things. I'm just clarifying that it's not like when you get a draft back from a collaborator you should just expect to have all citations be disambiguated duplicates. If that's happening, there's something wrong with the workflow.

I'm thinking of something along these lines:
1. A button that highlights all unlinked citations in the current document
2. An option to attempt to relink them, using metadata in those references to query the local library (or a group to be specified)

Virtual collections might be the way forward here. I'm not sure we've ever thought of them in this sort of context, but they would be a good way to show a sorted list of items in the document, show which items exist in local libraries, provide a natural place to relink them to a single item, copy orphaned ones back to a library, or even edit the embedded metadata directly without relying on a library.

I removed duplicate citations from the database.

To be clear, this is fine — you just need to merge them so that Zotero can store a link rather than deleting the duplicates.

Merging lets you choose a base version and even choose between different individual fields from the different versions.

Providing better ways to identify orphaned citations in a document is planned, but that doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't delete duplicate items you've cited — you should always merge them. You don't have to do that, but you should recognize that you're then not using Zotero as intended and some things will work worse than they need to. There's no way that ending up with an orphaned citation in a document that needed to be fixed later — no matter how that was made possible — would be easier than avoiding the problem to begin with.