Manually editing bibliography

dstillman
This discussion was created from comments split from: Citations not updating on refresh.
  • AlexandraAndreea
    Hi! I hope I am posting in the right theme, if not apologises. I have the following issue. I had cited in my PhD research lots of literature and then added the bibliography. In doing the last bits of polishing before submission I notice that I had typed some article titles wrong (typos) and I realised I need to change from document to web page some other resources, etc. The idea is that I polished the bibliography in Zotero but when I click on the bottom Add/Edit Bibliography, it does not update anything! The field of Bibliography List is still in gray.

    I do not want to do it manually bc it require horrible amounts of time!

    Can anyone help me, please?
    Mac Book Air, OS Catalina, v. 10.15.4, Word V. 16.16.13, Zotero Beta 5.0.88-beta.10+482b8b6f7.

    Many thanks!
  • dstillman
    (It's always better to start a new thread unless you're posting about the exact same topic. The thread you posted to was two years old and for someone else's specific issue. I've moved this to a new thread.)
    The field of Bibliography List is still in gray.
    Why do you think that's a problem? It's normal for the bibliography to be gray — citations and the bibliography are just Word fields, and that's how they always appear until you unlink citations and turn them into flat text.

    If you already have a bibliography inserted in the document and made changes in Zotero, you need to click Refresh for Zotero to update it.
  • AlexandraAndreea
    Hi, @dstillman , thank you for your reply!

    Next time I will start a new thread. I have clicked on refresh button from the Word (and previously refreshed the biblio in the app itself) but nothing happens. Only if I delete that specific reference in the text (in text citation) and then click Edit Bibliography is that specific reference changing. This is ok but it takes a lot of time.

    Is there anything else I can do?
  • dstillman
    OK, first, I'm not sure why you keep referring to Add/Edit Bibliography. Once you already have a bibliography in your document, that doesn't do anything relevant. That would just open up a window that allowed you to add/remove uncited items from the bibliography, which is rarely something anyone needs to do. It has nothing to do with just refreshing an existing bibliography in the document, which you do by clicking the Refresh button.
    and previously refreshed the biblio in the app itself
    I don't know what you mean by that. There's no bibliography in Zotero to "refresh". Are you just referring to making edits to items? "Refreshing" refers specifically to the Refresh button in Word that updates citations and the bibliography to reflect the current data in Zotero. There's nothing special you have to do to update your document after making changes in Zotero other than click Refresh.

    The main reason things wouldn't update in your document after you changed them in Zotero is that they're no longer linked to your Zotero library, which would happen if you deleted items in Zotero. You can check if an item is still linked to Zotero by clicking on it in the document, clicking Add/Edit Citation, clicking the blue bubble in the citation dialog, and looking for an "Open in My Library" button at the bottom of the popup. If they're no longer linked, you'll need to reinsert them.

    If you made manual changes to the citations in the document and then told Zotero not to update them, that would prevent the citations themselves from updating to reflect changes in Zotero (which is why you shouldn't do that either if you can help it), but the bibliography entries would still update.
  • AlexandraAndreea
    Later edit: It woked, but it took 30 min, because the document is large, so one needs to have patience; Thank you for the tip!

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