Question about new citations and existing bibliographies.

JMartin49
The context: I use LibreOffice document to add citations to a document using the "add citation" Zotero function. I create a bibliography incorporating the citations using the Zotero "add bibliography" function. Further work results in further citations that are not incorporated into the existing bibliography.

The question: Will using the Zotero "add bibliography" function a second time create distinct, second bibliography containing only the new citations (not desirable), or will the "add bibliography" update the existing bibliography (desirable)?

This, of course, is a beginner's question. But, the Zotero documentation I have read and the help forum answers I have seen have not addressed it in a way I understand. I therefore ask this beginner's question.

What's the answer?

Thank you.
  • adamsmith
    With normal use, this shouldn't be the case:
    Further work results in further citations that are not incorporated into the existing bibliography.
    The bibliography should update with every citation. If it doesn't, it's possible you have automatic updates turned off for the document (it does so automatically for large docs, though it should tell you) try clicking "Refresh" in the Zotero LibreOffice toolbar and see if that fixes things. If it doesn't something isn't right and we'd want to troubleshoot that further.

    (Don't press add bibliography multiple times; that'll just cause a mess).
  • JMartin49
    Thank you, adamsmith. The update is even easier than I thought it might be. I understand that adding a new citation to a LibreOffice document that has an associated, existing bibliography will result in the bibliography being updated automatically, without using "refresh" unless the user sets the automatic update switch to "no" or if the document is quite large, in which case the application will set the switch to "no".
  • bwiernik
    The application won’t disable automatic updates on its own, but it will ask you if you’d like to disable them if a citation update takes several seconds to complete.
  • JMartin49
    Thanks bwiernik. Yours is another useful reply. When time = (some value), an application timer detecting bibliography update activity asks the question about turning off auto-update. Is it possible to set the (some value) to a value other than a default?
  • bwiernik
    No it doesn't look like it. But you can always manually enable or disable auto-update of the document in the Document Preferences window.
  • JMartin49
    Thank you. Fiddling with a timer's default falls into the "Maybe some other time; I busy right now." category.
  • dstillman
    The hard-coded timeout is 15 seconds, FWIW.
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