Upgrade StorageIn-text references keep reverting back
Hello,
For some reason my in-text references would sometimes have the author's first name listed. I understand that this may be because of variations of the same author's name entered into Zotero, which I have already fixed (by ensuring all the references are under the exact same format of the name). When I open up a new document and enter an in-text reference, it comes out correctly. Also, when I click "edit" for my existing reference and hit enter, the comes out correctly.
However, when I click "refresh", all the references in my existing document would revert back to, e.g. (M.K. Halliday 2019) instead of (Halliday 2019). This is beginning to be quite frustrating as my document is getting larger and larger, and I dread having to go back and manually change each one of them.
What have I done wrong?
Lorraine
For some reason my in-text references would sometimes have the author's first name listed. I understand that this may be because of variations of the same author's name entered into Zotero, which I have already fixed (by ensuring all the references are under the exact same format of the name). When I open up a new document and enter an in-text reference, it comes out correctly. Also, when I click "edit" for my existing reference and hit enter, the comes out correctly.
However, when I click "refresh", all the references in my existing document would revert back to, e.g. (M.K. Halliday 2019) instead of (Halliday 2019). This is beginning to be quite frustrating as my document is getting larger and larger, and I dread having to go back and manually change each one of them.
What have I done wrong?
Lorraine
Don't manually edit the text of the citations in the document. Fix the data in Zotero and reinsert any orphaned citations, as explained on that page.
I should've been more clear, sorry. When I say I "manually" edited the citations, I actually meant I clicked on the citation, hit the "edit citation" button, and then simply hit enter without changing anything. That's when the correct citation came up (because like I said I'd already fixed any duplications or discrepancies on Zotero).
However, when I hit 'refresh', the citations would revert back to before. I don't really know what to do...I've read that page already, and it seems I'd done everything I could to prevent that. Any other pointers?
If so, you have "Automatically update citations" disabled, and what you're seeing is just a temporary placeholder. The actually correct citation is the one you see after you click Refresh, and it's correct because you haven't actually fixed the problem in the document, making the disambiguation necessary for the style guidelines. The fact that it works in a new document means that one of the problems on that page still applies to the existing document.
But in general, see the last step on Debugging Broken Documents to understand how to debug a problem like this. You can easily pinpoint the problem by copying progressively smaller halves of the document to another temporary document and seeing if the problem occurs.