Citations gone from document

Hello!

As I just noticed all citations I added to my dissertation document are no longer linked to Zotero. They're still in the file, but when I go there with the curser, they don't turn grey anymore.
I read in another thread, that changing the file from .doc to .odt will delete all Zotero links. I haven't done anything like that. The only thing I recently changed was the layout of the document.
All older versions I could find of that file are showing the same problem.

Any chance I can retrieve the lost information?

Big thanks for any kind of help,
Alex
  • I'm afraid not, if they're no longer active. (You can confirm that by toggling Word field codes.) I'm not sure what you mean by changing the layout of the document, but saving to some other format is really the only cause of this that we're aware of. It's not clear to me when your old versions are from, but obviously if the citations are flattened in those as well it would've had to have been something that happened before those were saved.
  • edited July 24, 2019
    Thank you for your reply!

    As I mentioned, the only thing I changed recently were styles of the headings/subheadings (that's what I meant with layout).

    Well, looks like I need to insert them all manually again. I'm glad that they're not gone completly, that would've been way worse.

    Or is there any kind of function that recognises the papers through the citations in the text (for example (Weber et al., 2006:34)) and then links it automatically? I guess you would've suggested it. Maybe something to consider in the future.

    Thank you anyway. Have a good day!
  • Rintze made a citation extractor (https://rintze.zelle.me/ref-extractor/), but that doesn't do what you want. You'll need to probably go through it one by one.
    Shouldn't take too long if you use the keyboard shortcuts: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_shortcuts
  • Your could use Zotero's RTF Scan feature to format the citations by searching and replacing all of the "()" with "{}". This won't make them live citations, but will let you change the style.
    https://www.zotero.org/support/rtf_scan

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