URGENT: My Zotero links have disappeared from the whole Word document!

Cécile Cam
Dear all,
I really need some help.
I am finishing my PhD, which is around 300 pages. I have been working on it yesterday and have add citations to my document. I wanted to update my bibliography. That's why I have clicked on "refresh" in order to update it (I was OFF line. I never tried to click on it before but I though it would refresh my bibliography).
No new bibliography came out. I consequently decided to close my document and not to save the changes I made regarding the bibliography.
When I opened my document this morning, none of my Zotero links were working. I am not able to add a bibliography anymore to my document as it seems no links appear on the document.
I have then decided to take an older version of my PhD (I save a new version almost every day) and all the previous versions I have of my work seem to have deleted the Zotero links or sometimes not to make them appear on my Word version (while being able to poduce a bibliography)...
I had sent some version of my PhD by mail, so I have been opening them to see if the Zotero links were appearing, which was not the case (and which is very strange).
Do you have any idea what I sould/can do? what's the problem?
Thanks in advance for your help.
  • adamsmith
    How do you tell that the Zotero links are gone? Which file format are you saving your files under (.doc, .docx, something else)?
  • Cécile Cam
    Thanks for your message.
    The Zotero links are gone first as, when I click on them they are not anymore appearing as black (as it used to be), second as when I try to add a bibliography, no reference appear in the bibliography.
    The format I am using is .docx
  • adamsmith
    Try pressing alt+F9 (alt+FN+F9 if you're on a Mac). Do you see any field codes appearing where Zotero items are? The lack of highlighting could just be a Word setting.

    Is there anything unusual about your setup -- where you save files, other software you open it, etc? E.g. if you were to open and save a .docx file with different software, you'd very likely lose the Zotero links.
  • Cécile Cam
    Thanks for your answer. It seems there has been either a Word update or a Zotero update that might have changed something... I anyway succeed to work using another laptop and another version of Word. As I am on a hurry for my work, I will just keep working and will try to figure out later what happened exactly. Man thanks
  • ahitkaantarhan
    I am having a very similar issue. I am writing a thesis and finished my citations yesterday and made sure that I saved my word document. I am using OneDrive, so my documents are saved and synced there. Today I opened it up and realized that all the citations I had inserted had completely disappeared, as in, the in-text citations were all gone. I don't understand why, but this is seriously concerning?
  • adamsmith
    Could you give an example? Actual text disappearing from Word documents wouldn't be a Zotero issue. It can't possibly do that.
  • klhavlik
    Although I didn't lose links, I couldn't add a new citation. After reading Zotero's help area, I found that backing up the file to OneDrive caused the issue. OneDrive doesn't play well with Zotero, apparently. I had to save a copy to my local drive (thereby bypassing OneDrive...I guess?) and then everything seemed to work well. I guess I'll need to disconnect OneDrive as a saving location.
  • bwiernik
    So long as you are actively syncing the documents to your local hardrive using the OneDrive app, Zotero works fine with OneDrive documents.
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