Two questions from newbie

I am working on a long-ish essay for my PhD. Using Harvard Westminster, running Zotero 5 on Mac, Word 16.31. So far so good.

1. I manually entered a book chapter (of mine), which is published in 2019, the same year that another journal article (of mine) is published. In creating the citation using Zotero on Word, I notice the letters a and b are not automatically generated. Other cases within the same Word document (another author, two articles, published same year) written earlier automatically generated letters a and b after author name when using Zotero. Did I accidentally deny or agree on auto updating the whole document? How can i correct this?

2. In my listing on references on Zotero, there are two indications where there are duplicated documents. They are in fact not duplicate. In both cases, they are published in the same year and feature the same author, but are found in two different publications. Why does Zotero insist on considering the entries as duplicates? Interestingly, when generating citation, Zotero does differentiate the two essays (by the same author, published in the same year, in two publications) using a and b after the author name. Please explain.

Many thanks
  • 1. Do you have automatic updating turned off (as would be indicated by dotted underlining beneath the citations)? This is certainly the fastest approach using Word for Mac for a long document like a thesis, so I think that's likely. In that case, the disambiguation a/b letters will only be added after you refresh the whole document. If that is not the problem, then reply here and someone will be able to help you.

    2. False duplicates are a common and known problem for Zotero. There has been some talk of adding an option to mark 'not duplicates' but that is difficult for technical reasons. If you search the forums you'll find various discussions about this. For now, the duplicates are just educated guesses, with different criteria for different item types, and there's nothing you can do about it. Personally I just ignore that function. (Or you might want to check through it all once before finalizing your dissertation, for example.)
  • 1. I have automatic updating turned on, in fact. I tried to refresh a few times. But let me check.

    2. Thanks for the explanation.
  • 1. Is this because while working on this document, I moved from an older platform (Zotero 4, older Word) to a newer platform (Zotero 5, Word 16.31)? Could this be the reason? How can I rectify? I tried to create a new document and tried to insert the two different citations (same author, same year, two different articles), and the issue seemed to persist.
  • edited November 17, 2019
    (Someone else will be able to better answer your question than me. But the first question will be whether this is consistent in a new document, as you're checking. No, I don't think it would be different in different versions of Zotero because this is determined by the style, not by Zotero itself. So the next question is whether the style has changed or is different than you thought. Are you sure it's set to disambiguate with letters? Under what conditions? Does it work properly if you use a different style for testing?)
  • By style, you mean Harvard Westminster (which I use)?
  • I checked. My current style is Westminster Harvard. I hope the previous is also Westminster Harvard. I did try to delete the new entry and re-enter it again in my Zotero app. It does not seem to change much.
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