Problems with changing excisting or adding new citations in an document

evelynespoeri1987
Can someone help me to solve this problem?
When I tried to add a few more papers to exciting citations or even add new citations, this error ocurred:

" Sie haben Veränderungen an dieser Zitation vorgenommen, nachdem sie von Zotero erstellt wurde. Wollen sie ihre Veränderungen beibehalten und spätere Updates verhindern?
Wenn sie "JA" auswählen, wird Zotero diese Zitation nicht aktualisieren, wenn sie weitere Zitationen hinzufügen, einen anderen Zitationsstil wählen oder die Literaturangabe, auf die sie sich bezieht, verändern. Wenn sie "NEIN" wählen, werden Ihre Veränderungen gelöscht."

Thanks for your help in advance!!!!
Best Evelyne

  • adamsmith
    We're seeing more people getting this message recently, so we're looking into what may be going on, but the basics are still what the mssage says:
    Some of the old citations were changed directly in the Word document, either directly by you or somehow automatically by Word.

    If you don't remember making those changes, you can just click "Nein" -- you may have to do this multiple times in a row since this is about the existing citations in the document, no about the new one you're adding.
  • sphrsk
    Hi there,

    Do you have news on this? I keep on receiving this message a lot lately (somtimes 10, 15 times in a row) and I am quite worried about the quotations in my text.

    The interesting thing is that the correct quotation is the one that Zotero refers to the 'original' but neither pressing 'yes' or 'no' inserts this one. In both cases the system leaves the (wrong) citation in the text. (It has not been wrong before - Zotero must have changed it).

    To my knowledge, I have not adapted any citations, this is why I am confused. But it seems that I made some kind of mistake...

    Thanks for your help in advance,
    Sophia

  • adomasven
    Are you using Word for Mac? Can you reproduce this problem in a cut down version of this document (just one or a couple of pages of text where the problem occurs)?
  • sphrsk
    I am using Word for Mac indeed.

    I have screenshots of several of those prompts pop up. Would that work? I don't know if I can reproduce the problem (happens randomly) but I could distill a few troublesome pages.

    I went through all screenshots I took from those prompts and distilled 8 papers that reoccur. It's not an issue to run through the citations that I got the prompts for. But I am worried that my choice of either yes or no messes up that source in more spots in the document (maybe even without noticing). So, the question is: should I click yes or no to prevent that the system messes up further citations?
  • adomasven
    Screenshots won't help. You should look at step 10 of https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents and isolate the part of the document that reproduces the problem and send it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.
  • adomasven
    Sorry it took a while to look at this. Do you have a backup of this document before you started seeing this problem?

    Do you remember whether there was some specific operation that started triggering the issue?

    It seems that the snippet that you sent to us is corrupt. The underlying field codes have shifted by one position and now Zotero expects each citation to have the text of the previous one, which is why you're getting all those popups. Your best for this document would be to restore it from an earlier backup.
  • sphrsk
    edited November 6, 2020
    Thanks for your answer!

    This issue is triggered when I add new quotations - it seems to be connected to only a few specific authors/citations.

    I have a backup, but from an earlier version only and I have worked quite a bit on this document in the meantime. Is there any way to save this document? Is it possible to correct those field codes?

    Should I click yes or no when the system raises this question?
  • adomasven
    If you're seeing the messages it means the document is already corrupt. The first time you start seeing these messages after the document refreshes fine means that the last operation you performed on it caused a corruption. We would need to figure out what that operation is.

    Unfortunately there is no way to restore the citations in the current version of the document. We're very sorry for the inconvenience, a recent fix to another problem has introduced this bug, which we have not been able to track down yet since we cannot reproduce it.
  • sphrsk
    Thanks adomasven. I would appreciate if you'd give me a hands-on advice how to proceed now. We're talking about a 50 pages document that I need to save somehow. Therefore some follow ups:

    Is the problem rooted in the document or in the quotation?
    Would I solve the problem if I delete and re-enter all troubled quotations in the text?
    Or is it the saved document in my library that causes troubles and would do again every time I quote it in a text?



  • adomasven
    Reinserting all citations in the document would solve the problem. Your best bet is to say "Yes" to the dialogs about changed citations for the whole document, then go over each citations one-by-one and redo them. You should take intermittent backups of the document during this process, as well as after finishing with the citation re-entering. If you trigger this bug again somehow and can describe what steps caused it, we will fix it.
  • adomasven
    @sophiarussack After thinking about this some more it could have also been triggered by editing the Word document while Zotero was working on it, or while the Zotero citation dialog was open.
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