Zotero does not recognize old references
I'm working on a shared document. Zotero does not recognize the references created by my colleague who originated the document and references. Instead, the added references I am adding are beginning from 1 half way through the document. Please advise.
I've hired someone to insert references and create a bibliography. She included me in a group and sent me the document as an email attachment. I downloaded Zotero, registered and took steps in the 'edit/preferences' tab as suggested in the tutorial. The word document is saved as a .doc Word document.
The bibliography is not grey which means something has indeed happened. Question is whether there is something she needs to do on her end or something I'm not doing on my end.
Thanks again for any guidance on this.
Veronica
(The citations are using a built in feature of Word--fields--the same feature that is used for automatic tables of contents, figure captions, etc. This feature is not supported by older formats or other programs such as Apple Pages or Google Docs, so you need to be sure to not open the file in those programs to preserve the live fields.)
If you like, you can post the original document you received from your assistant to Dropbox or similar and give a link here. I can check if the document has live citations in it. If you can't do that publicly, you could email to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.
thanks again for taking the time. Wish there were someone to speak with.
But this is not a Zotero issue. Again, Zotero citations are standard Word fields, the same as all the things bwiernik lists above. Someone saved your file in the wrong format or with the wrong tool. Saving from Word as a .docx doesn't cause this — that would be a catastrophic Word bug, and it doesn't happen. So if she did save it that way, it was already broken before that.
You'll need to restore to a version of the document that still had live fields.
How can it be active on her PC and inactive as soon as i open it. I am new at this so there could be something I'm missing.
Thanks for any advice.
If you're definitely both using Word, let's make sure the fields are actually not recognized (how fields are displayed is a Word setting, so that may not look the same for you). What happens if you open the document and immediately after receiving it, click on "Document Preferences" and select a different citation style, e.g. Chicago (author-date) which would turn the citations into in-text author-date if they're still active?
Whether I use Chicago or Vancouver (superscript), it doesn't recognize the 109 citations in the document. Zotero works and a citation appears, but it is creating a new set of citations.
a mystery
Is the problem on my end or on her end?
How do I invite her on this discussion?
Please advise.
Not sure what you mean by "narrative", but if she can send both versions, that might be helpful.
You need to go back to a version of the document where the citations are live — where you can click Refresh in the Zotero toolbar and it does not say "You must insert a citation before performing this operation." If it says that, the citations are already flattened.
@arohan, the document you sent has only one active Zotero citation and a Zotero bibliography. A Zotero bibliography is simply a reflection of the citations in the document as of the last Zotero operation — if you right-click on it and click Toggle Field Codes, you can see that all it is under the hood is
ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY
. So when you click Refresh, the formatted text of the bibliography is reduced to the one active citation still remaining in the document.I'm afraid there is only one answer we can give you here, and it's the same one we've been giving from the beginning: you need to restore to a version of the document from before the citations — not the bibliography — were flattened. Since the version you sent still has an active bibliography, it means that whatever happened happened between the last time you used Zotero in the document and when that version was saved.