Sudden disapperance of ciation links in a long document

Emmanuel Lourie
Error ID : 1907627707

Hi,
I have been working on a paper in word (v-2304), and suddently, and after I fixed issues with the bibiolography (duplicates mainly) the documnet turned into plain tet without the citation links to Zotero (v-6.0.26). none of the solutions in this troublshooting tutorial helped: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents

Restoring previouse versions also doesn't help (they have the non-eddited citations, and properly linked to Zotero).

There is a chance that this issue started after I tried to manually edit a reference in the bibiolography, but I am not 100% sure this happened immditelly after. It also occured while I was working on an open document.

Help!

Thank you
  • dstillman
    This is the relevant link:

    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/existing_citations_not_detected
  • dstillman
    (And no, manually editing a reference in the bibliography certainly wouldn't cause this, but that also doesn't make sense as a thing to do unless you also used the plugin's Unlink Citations button, which certainly does cause this.)
  • Emmanuel Lourie
    edited July 17, 2023
    Sorry @dstillman for giving the wrong link. I have gone through all the stages in the link you shared now, and it didn't help. Neither did I unlink the citations.
    Another thought - can it be related to a folder shared with me in Zotero?
    I also added additional storage space (for lack of other soultions), which didn't do the trick either, perhaps unsurprisingly

    Thank you
  • adamsmith
    If we knew of other reasons this happens, they'd be listed in the above documentation. Since Zotero citations make use of a basic Word feature (the same one used for page numbers, cross-references, etc.), it's very, very unlikely that they'd disappear any other way, and if they did, that would be due to a catastrophic Word bug.
    That said, how exactly are you checking for unlinked citations? It would, again, be very unlikely that this would affect earlier versions of the document.
  • Emmanuel Lourie
    Thank you. I am checking for unlinked citations by refreshing Zotero (then it said I must insert citations first), or hovering over the existing citations (and seeing they aren't flagged). Previous versions, before the above mentioned changes, are there and are linked. I am trying to not redo all the tedious work of fixing Zoteros unexplained duplicates and missing markers in the text manually. Maybe word went through a serious bug, but if so, it didn't give any warning or posthoc report, and I definitely did not unlink the citations myself.
    The only thing I can add to this mastery, is that this happened soon after I changed my citation style preferences, which is now numbered-citaions, rather than author + year.
  • dstillman
    As explained on that page, the most likely cause is editing with some other tool or saving in the wrong format. E.g., if you edited the file in Dropbox or Google Docs (without following a transfer process for the latter), or if you saved as something other than .docx, that would break all citations. And, obviously, clicking Unlink Citations by mistake and clicking through the confirmation dialog would do it.

    There's almost no chance it was anything other than those things. Word fields don't just get flattened.

    But as the page says, if the citations are unlinked, you'll need to either revert to a previous version of the document or reinsert the citations.

    I'm afraid there's really nothing else we can tell you.
  • Emmanuel Lourie
    That's ok, I will probably have to switch to another program. Again, I definitely did not do any of the steps that you (or that thread) mentioned could flattenen the document. I still think it must have been some other bug related to the one of the (other) things I mentioned I did (e.g., editing manually one line of the bibliography, or switching styles).

    Thanks anyways.
  • dstillman
    These are standard Word fields, the same kind used by other citation managers. There has never been a case in Zotero's entire history of citations in Word getting flattened erroneously by some bug. It just doesn't happen.

    Note that Word makes it possible to flatten all fields. It's far more likely that it was one of the things we list, but an errant Ctrl+Shift+F9 would also do it.
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