Zotero citation refresh deleting Word document content

kellan82
I am running Word for Mac (Word version 16.44, Mac OS Big Sur 11.1) and have inserted a bibliography using Zotero (5.0.95-beta.3+4db61b8dc). It has been working fine until I tried to update the bibliography with a new citation today - it seems that somehow part of the content of the document has become associated with the bibliography field code, so when the bibliography refreshes, it deletes that content. I assume this is what's happening because when I click on the problematic content, it highlights in the same color gray as the bibliography, and the content that isn't being deleted (even though all of the content contains citations) does not do that. I have tried restarting both Zotero and Word, and the problem persists. How can I disassociate the content from the bibliography to stop it from being deleted when the bibliography refreshes?
  • adomasven
    Are you using Bookmarks or Fields in Zotero Document Preferences to store citations? Either way, you should copy out the text of document out from the biliography field and paste it somewhere else. That might not work in unlinking it from the bibliography, in which case you should either use special paste (under right-click menu) or paste it in a different document editor such as libreoffice or google docs and then paste it back into word.
  • kellan82
    I am using Fields. I think there is some unfortunate interaction between track changes in Word and Zotero updates. Copying and pasting the problematic content into a new document causes me to lose tracked changes, but I've just decided to go with that in order to fix the Zotero bibliography problem. Thanks for your assistance.
  • adomasven
    Yes, using Zotero with Track Changes enabled is not recommended and might cause weird bugs or citation corruption, although what you have described is more unusual than what we've generally seen. If you're able to figure out a way to reproduce this please post here.
  • sourishbasu
    I found this thread while trying to troubleshoot the exact same problem, and no, I don't have tracked changes. I have a text box with "tight" layout specified, and in this specific document the bibliography wraps around it (I have disabled auto-refresh of the bibliography). See https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VLgbpES_4KQge3OTJvIrON5300yDRKnM/view?usp=sharing for a screenshot. When I refresh the bibliography, it deletes this text box. I kept losing text boxes like this, and finally figured out that it was happening when I refreshed the bibliography. This is broken behavior, IMO.
  • adomasven
    @sourishbasu It's unlikely we can do anything here. Zotero will replace any changes you make to the bibliography text upon refresh, because you're never meant to manually edit the bibliography.

    In your instance you are placing this chart "within" the text of the bibliography, as far as Word is concerned, and when we ask Word to delete and reinsert the bibliography, it deletes your chart with it. If you definitely need that chart there, you can insert it after finalizing the citations and bibliography with Zotero.
  • sourishbasu
    @adomasven, my question is why is this text box becoming a part of the bibliography? I put that text box there first, when I had a shorter bibliography, and set the text box to not move with the text. Then, when I add more citations and re-generate the bibliography, it flows around the text box. However, in doing so, it makes the text box as part of the bibliography as well. Is that avoidable?
  • adomasven
    That's not really a question for Zotero, but for Word. And my best-guess answer is that's the way Word is programmed to behave. When you set a text-box to not move with the text, internally Word most-likely re-anchors the text box to a different part of the text every time it reflows.

    Whether that's avoidable or not, you may ask Microsoft support, or try experimenting yourself with different ways of attaching the text box, but I imagine it's unlikely.
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