Switching Document Preferences

edited August 4, 2022
I use google docs and have added around 50 citations to a paper I drafted in the last 3 days. I had chosen Chicago Manual of Style (full note), which appeared as footnotes on the individual pages. Some of the citations wouldn't work ("Selected field wxv9WU not returned from Docs backend"), I wasn't sure if some of them just suddenly broke, or if all the broken ones were stuck on "updating" from the start, so I took notes in roam daily about if there are any changes to the ones that are broken. I had no more issues with new citations if I caught the error quickly, deleted the citation, and reloaded the gdoc page if the citations didn't immediately appear.

During a chat with my supervisor yesterday, he suggested I change the document citation style.

We then switched to Nature style and added a reference list at the end of the document and that looked alright, except the broken citations, which were still in footnotes. Today, I wanted to switch back to having all my citations in footnotes again (so Chicago, full note), and now all I get is errors (Zotero experienced an error updating your document. Would you like to view troubleshooting instructions?). I've gone trough all of the troubleshooting steps and get stuck on removing all the broken citations (it's around 6), as one of them just doesn't allow to be deleted.

I spent more than an hour today troubleshooting this and I'm incredibly frustrated. Please help.
  • How are you trying to remove broken citations? You're supposed to just delete them from the text in Google Docs. Generally if you see {Updating} in the document after all Zotero progress dialogs have closed, it means something went wrong when inserting the citation, although usually you should get an error message for that. You should report any such issue if you can reproduce them reliably and describe in full what steps you take that cause the error.
  • I'm removing them by deleting them in the written text.
    I could reliably cause error by trying to insert several citations after another without refreshing the page.

    But that's not the error I'm mainly concerned with right now - I removed all the broken citations except for what I call my "mysterious footnote" that I can't edit (it doesn't appear in the body of the text whatsoever, only in the footer).

    It's probably related somewhat but my main concern is that the switching between different citation styles gives me this error.
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