I also tried making a copy of the document and it did not give me the option of unliking the citations.

What do you mean by that? The Zotero menu should be in any google document and always includes that option

And you get that in the copy too? We're confused because you said "it did not give me the option".

Can you provide a Report ID from Zotero after triggering the error?

The debugging steps would still be relevant — the last step explains how to quickly isolate problems in the document.

You can always provide a Report ID. Please follow my link. Again, we need a Report ID from Zotero after triggering the error.

Can you provide Debug ID (different from a Report ID) from Zotero for reproducing this?

The document is inaccessible. Please try again later.

Does it work in a new document?

If this is a large document, you may be rate-limited by Google and need to wait.

Beyond that, restart your browser and try again, and if it asks for permission, make sure you're selecting the same Google account that you used to create the document. Your Zotero account is irrelevant.

No, by a new document, I mean a completely empty document that you've inserted a single citation into — not a copy.

In the word document, it tells me I have to first insert a citation before it can unlink it

Just downloading an existing document with Zotero citations won't transfer citations in a way that can be unlinked — there's a special step required for that, but that's unlikely to work if unlinking doesn't work.

But if you have Word, you can just take the downloaded document, open it in Word, and remove all Word fields. This thread (and the page linked from there) explains a couple ways to do that:

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/81721/removing-all-zotero-references-fields

Which you use depends on whether you have non-Zotero fields you want to keep active.

I did try inserting a single zotero-linked reference into a separate word document and then clicking "unlink citation" from the Zotero tab in word and it did not work.

Meaning you created a new, blank document, inserted a single citation with Add/Edit Citation, and then clicked Unlink Citations, and that gave you an error? That wouldn't be related to your original problem — Word and Google Docs are totally separate — but we'd want to see a Debug ID for that.

In any case, for your original document, you should do what I say above and just remove all field codes.

I explained how above.

Yeah, I don't think the linked thread is what you want (since that's actually for deleting citations, not just their link to Zotero). But I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "unlinking the citations in my reference section" -- what's the actual thing you're trying to achieve?

But what I've understood so far is that you have a google doc with Zotero citations and you want the equivalent of unlink citations (which, to be clear, removes the link of the citations to Zotero), and the unlink citation button isn't working/triggering an error.

I'm reluctant to contradict dstillman above, but I actually do think you can do this with a version of the document just downloaded to .docx and opened in Word. The relevant info is that in that document, the Zotero citations aren't actually Zotero-linked anymore once you're in Word, but they're hyperlinks (you can right-click on a citation and select "Edit Hyperlink" to see). And there is a way to remove all hyperlinks in a Word document at once:


1. Press Ctrl+A to select all text.

2. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9. (Depending on your setup, that might be ctlr+fn+shift+f9)

That will give you a Word doc with no link to Zotero left whatsoever.

Note that this will, of course, also remove any other hyperlinks in the document (that's actually clickable links; it won't delete the underlying text, including if that's a URL)

I'm reluctant to contradict dstillman above, but I actually do think you can do this with a version of the document just downloaded to .docx and opened in Word.

Just to note, this was actually what I was trying to explain. From the page linked from the thread I linked to:

If you mean that you want to get rid of the fields and replace them with plain text that represents the result of the field, then the easiest method is to select the entire document (Ctrl+A) and then press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to "unlink" the fields. Everyplace there was a field, the field is deleted and replaced with the result of the field.

I just forgot that the thread itself and the rest of the linked page were describing something different. Sorry for the confusion.

for any mac users that may come across this problem in the future, " Ctrl+Shift+F9" didn't work for me but "command + 6" did.

It's Cmd-Shift-F9 (Cmd-Shift-Fn-F9) on a Mac, but it looks like Cmd-6 works too.

In any case, I've created a knowledge-base page for this that we can link to in the future.