Citations do not update

bilebitola · January 7, 2020

I am writing a longer document and, in order to deal with the word limit, I decided to shorten the publisher names (for example Oxford University Press to OUP). However, refreshing the document from the Zotero tab seems to have partially changes these. Also, it seem to remember some references by the old entries and some by the new ones so, for example, in the Bibliography it is giving two entries for the same book (one is the old version of the item before i edited it, and the other is the new one). I checked and I have only one item now in Zotero desktop, the new one. So, I don't know why two show up in the bibliography.

I am working on a mac, in zotero 5.0.80. and i have the latest add on added to word 16.32.

What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance!

dstillman · January 7, 2020

I decided to shorten the publisher names (for example Oxford University Press to OUP)

In the document itself? You don't want to do that with active citations. If you do, Zotero will prompt you for each changed citation whether you want to keep your changes or revert them and let Zotero update the metadata normally.

If you need to actually correct data, you should do that in Zotero itself and then refresh.

If you want to make changes for a given document, you should just wait until the end, use the Unlink Citations button on a copy of the document, and modify the citations as plain text before submitting the document.

Also, it seem to remember some references by the old entries and some by the new ones

That shouldn't happen from editing regardless — it would happen if you had multiple items in Zotero and deleted some without using merging, and then reinserted an item still in your library. See https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation#deleted_citations for more info.

bilebitola · January 7, 2020

Thank you for your reply.

I changed the references through Zotero desktop, not in the document itself. I then waited for the document to update and thought that it is all done because the very last references had abreviated publisher names. But, now that i went back to read the text, i see that some references throughout the text have kept the longer names, although they were updated.

I did have multiple items and deleted some without merging. So, that may be causing the problem... So, that means going back through the citations using the method you suggested, correct? Bummer... Well, at least now i know to merge rather than delete... Thank you.