Citations unlinked in Google Docs

dstillman Zotero Team
This discussion was created from comments split from: Citations are unlinked.
  • vjulius
    I'm honestly disappointed in the way Zotero handles this unlinking problem. I have the same issue every once in a while and it's getting ever more annoying. Today, the whole 15 pages of citations was unlinked. My unlinking issue is definitely not caused by copy+pasting or dragging. For me, the classical reproduction steps are these:
    1. Open google docs
    2. Add new citation
    3. Zetore plugin asks for login
    4. I select google account, click, login screen closes

    Expected: I can now search for the citation
    Reality: Red horizontal bar doesn't have input field, nothing happens, google docs has white semi-transparent background forever

    5. I refresh the page to get back to editing
    6. Citations are unlinked

    In addition, why I'm disappointed about the responses to this issue in this forum is that the solution steps to go back to a previous document version does absolutely nothing. The links are lost for all the past versions as well. So the only thing I could do is manually link all the citations! There are 50 of them...

    The main problems with relinking citations are that
    1. When I have cited article X N times then I have to relink it N times. The relinking system should relink all the N citations of X at once.
    2. The relinking process is super slow because I have to do it one by one, every time the citation search opens like 5 seconds, it's painful process.

    Why don't you just fix the unlinking issue in the first place! Could you maybe make a paid version of Zotero so that this issue could be solved?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    The only known causes of unlinking are the ones that are documented, and there are no technical solutions to fix them.
    In addition, why I'm disappointed about the responses to this issue in this forum is that the solution steps to go back to a previous document version does absolutely nothing. The links are lost for all the past versions as well.
    That's not something we've ever seen, and it may point to the core misunderstanding here. As it explains on the page I linked to, when it tells you something is unlinked isn't when it was unlinked. It tells you that on the next Zotero operation after whatever caused the unlinking. So if you go back to a previous version and refresh and it says citations are unlinked, it wasn't the refreshing that caused it — you just reverted to a version where the citations were already unlinked but you just hadn't been notified yet, because you hadn't yet interacted with Zotero since whatever caused it.

    If you think you have a document where all past versions were unlinked, and you're able to share it with us, create a share link and send it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.

    But if you check more carefully you'll quite likely find that it's possible to go back to a version where the citations still work, and some operation since then is what caused the unlinking.
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