No, I'm confident I haven't copied and pasted them elsewhere and then back into the document. I might have copied and pasted some sections within the document, but I don't think I've done it to all sections that have been affected, so I don't think that is the answer, But I'll pay attention to my copying and pasting and see what happens.

Yes, it's definitely a Google Doc, not Word. But thank you - I do appreciate your suggestions and your thought on this problem.

I haven't had the citations de-link since I posted my original comment. I am trying to keep close track of actions I take with the document to try to pinpoint what might be prompting the de-linking should it happen again.

@kdybala we are not aware of any other problems that could cause citations to unlink. You can always look at and restore versions of the document from the revision history to try and track down what change exactly lead to their unlinking.

@mihussai The citations in your document are unlinked (the underlying field codes Zotero stores to identify the items are gone from the document) and triggering a Zotero action (any action will have the same result) is making Zotero notice that. The primary reason for citations becoming unlinked is somebody copying/pasting text in the document without the Zotero Connector installed in their browser. Your best bet for restoring citations is attempting to work with an earlier version of the document from the Google Docs version history.

A bug has recently surfaced (possibly due to some changes by Google Docs) which had broken copy-pasting citations, but since has been fixed and we know of no bugs that would prevent citations from copying properly as long as the Zotero Connector is installed on the browser where the document is being edited.

@adomasven will need to say more about the underlying problem, but note that the feature that detects unlinked citations is new, so it's not necessarily the case that whatever problem you're facing is new.

The best chance of fixing this would be if you could figure out exactly what step it is you're taking that's causing it to happen. Version history can probably help you figure that out.

Just to be sure, you're not sharing the document with anyone else?

And are you positive your collaborator has the Zotero connector installed in all their browsers when they work with the doc?

That may be a misunderstanding. If someone else makes an edit to the document without the Connector, they wouldn't get a warning, and you wouldn't get a warning right away. You'd only get a warning the next time you did something that caused Zotero to refresh the document.

Again, you should be able to determine this definitely from the version history. You'll need to revert to a particular point and then click Refresh in the plugin to see if it triggers the warning.

That's almost certainly not happening. Simply editing an item in Zotero would not unlink it from the document — there's just nothing even remotely related happening there.

I then "update"/edit the citation in google doc.

What do you mean by this? All you need to do is press Refresh. And if the warning doesn't appear then, the problem had nothing to do with the edit.

Again, there's really no need to speculate here. This is almost certainly going to be some sort of change you make in Google Docs, not in Zotero. You can figure that out from the version history.

I agree with you, but seeing it.

If we say the thing you think is happening almost certainly isn't really happening, insisting that it is isn't a useful response. We know what's in the realm of likely possibilities here. The way to get this fixed is to tell us the exact steps to reliably reproduce it in a new document. Even if editing metadata somehow was causing this — which would be a major, bizarre bug that other people would likely be reporting — we would still need exact steps to reliably reproduce it.

Since no one else is reporting this, and we can't reproduce it, that's the only way this problem, whatever it is, will get fixed.

By update/edit, I mean I click the inserted citation, and the Zotero "window" comes up that says "Edit with Zotero", which I click on it.

And then what? And why? While nothing in there should cause anything to become unlinked, that's not something you should be doing if you just made a change to metadata in Zotero.

For what it's worth, I'm currently getting a "Selected field […] not returned from Docs backend" error the second time I click "Edit with Zotero" on a just-inserted citation in a document. Reloading the Google Docs page causes that to work again for existing citations. I can reproduce that several versions of the Connector back, so it may be a change on the Google Docs side. We'll investigate, but again, you shouldn't need to use that if you simply edited metadata in Zotero.

I'm experiencing widespread spontaneous (but not 100%) un-linking as well. It's quite frustrating. This is a long document 12,000 words with 100+ citations I'll add some cites in gdocs vis the zotero tab in chrome, go on to other parts of the document, and come back. Post refresh, some of the new cites are unlinked.

Is the upshot of this that ALL individuals who have access to doc must have zotero connector installed, even if they are not editing citations?

Thanks @dstillman -- not good, but good to know. I'll keep an eye on who touches the document, and who among them has the connector installed.

@mstyang: If you're able to reproduce the unlinking, we'd want to see a Debug ID from the Zotero Connector for it happening, as well as the exact steps to get it to happen.

Having multiple Google accounts doesn't matter, but when prompted for authorization by the plugin you need to choose the account associated with the document you're editing. (But if you chose another I believe it would give you an error immediately, not just not work later on.)

If you see the notification about broken links it means that the very previous action had already broken it. That would have been copying the citations. We haven't tested working with different google docs accounts at the same time, but I suspect that some things, like copying citations between docs owned by different accounts might indeed not work correctly. Copying withing a document should work as long as that's the document that you have Zotero authenticated for citing.

Restarting Zotero has no effect on the citation links in Google Documents. Only editing the documents would. Are you editing with a browser that has the Zotero Connector installed?