Zotero citation mess up with MS Word's words count

kilimangarou
Hi there!
First I want to thank you for providing me with Zotero, it helps me tremendously.
Now I just discovered that Zotero messes up with the words count of MS Word (Word 2013 for PC). Scientific writing requires to stick with some rules, one of which is to limit the size of paragraphs to a certain number of words to increase clarity and efficiency (ultimately this is all about summarizing and not storytelling) so I need this feature.
However, when I insert citations from zotero, the word count of a marked paragraph increases dramatically. I suppose that MS Word counts all the words included in the citation (authors, title, summary, journal etc).
Would it be possible to take care of this problem, please?
  • bwiernik
    This is an issue with Word, rather than anything Zotero can do. Earlier versions of Word counted all the words embedded in fields (like Zotero and other reference managers use to store data, but also built-in features like titles, tables of contents, and other uses of Fields), rather than the displayed text.

    This is changed in later Word versions (Word 2019, Word 365, perhaps also Word 2016 I don’t recall). You can either upgrade to one of those Word versions, or, as a workaround, save a copy of your document, click the Unlink Citations button in the Zotero tab in the copy, count the words there, then return to editing in the live document.
  • kilimangarou
    Thank you for the workaround, it works actually pretty good. When I click the "unlink citations" button, a new window opens, asking me to confirm. If I cancel at this point, the words count becomes normal again. Not sure if Zotero is still able to update the citations but since I canceled, I guess so.
  • poettli
    edited March 28, 2019
    As you cancelled, it should be. First make a copy then unlink on this copy, before you lose everything.
  • Justicio
    Thank you for this solution!!! I could not understand why this kept happening! It's worse when you are trying to edit down a manuscript!
  • alexanderkasarda
    I figured out how to count the words without unlinking anything. In word, select the text that you want a word count for. Then, at the bottom of the document where the word count is displayed, click the XXX of XXX words. A dialogue box will open up, you can now uncheck the "Include footnotes and endnotes." This will give you an accurate word count. Hope this helps everyone.
  • bwiernik
    Note that that would only work if you are using a note style, rather than an in-text (author-date or numeric) style.
  • qianliu88
    Hello! I don't have this problem when I use EndNote for a research project. However, when I use Zotero for another research project, I come across this problem. I think its a Zotero issue rather than MS Word. Better get someone to check this.
  • adomasven
    This is a known issue, although it doesn't exist in new versions of Word. You can see the correct word count by making a copy of your document and using "Unlink Citations" option in the Zotero plugin in Word.
  • bwiernik
    As adomasven notes, this is a bug in Word 2010 and earlier that counted the embedded data in fields, not the displayed content. Endnote doesn’t embed data in the document like Zotero (so you can’t work with a document unless it was made with your Endnote library). The easiest solution is to update to a more recent version of Word, which fixed this bug.

    Otherwise, a workaround is to make a copy of the document, unlink then Zotero citations in the copy, and count the words there.
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