Ghost source/citation

edited April 26, 2021
I have a problem.
In my list of 'Works Cited', I have two entries by the same author and the same year and almost same everything. One is called Feng, Lei, 2014a, the other Feng, Lei, 2014b.

My problem is that I can only find references/citations in my text to 2014b.

I have tried to delete them and remake them.

In Zotero I have searched for the entry for 2014a: there is no such. I place my search on ’My library top level’, and I have searched for the author, the editor, words from the title etc. 2014a does NOT exist in Zotero.
I have looked in ’deleted’ and in the folder ’Not yet filed’ (my Zotero is in Danish, so I am not certain of the precise titles in English).
2014a is NOT in Zotero.
I tried altering ’Lei’ to ’Tarzan’ to make certain that the ones that I used in my thesis are 2014b. And correctly, all citations in my document were altered to T. Feng. And in the list of Works cited, one was then called Feng, Lei, 2014 and one was called, Feng, Tarzan, 2014.

I have tried to refresh my list of works cited so many times.

Besides my supervisor (who is also one of those marking my thesis) being very strict on us not having references which are not used, it looks weird having two almost identical sources underneath each other.

What in the world do I do? How doI remove the reference/citation in 'Works cited', which has not been used in the document and which does not exist in my Zotero database?
  • What's going on is most likely that a duplicate reference to Feng 2014 is embedded in your document, and got deleted with leaving the Word "field code", i.e. the underlying, machine-readable info intact.

    What I'd do to find it is show word field codes (i.e. the reverse of what's described here: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes ) and then search for the title of the item. That should help you identify the place where it exists as a field code (the grey code gobbledygook) but not actually in the text.
  • Thank you. I will try that.
  • edited April 26, 2021
    Thank you so much. When I switched the codes on, and made a search, I found it between 'T' and 'he' in a sentence. I cut the sentence, pasted it into a notepad, copied it again and pasted it into my thesis. Then made a refresh of my 'Works cited'. The ghost citation is gone. Thank you.
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