Citations link to my library instead of web link

andyrandria · November 2, 2023

Whenever I press my citation or bibliography links they send the link towards my library and doesn't show the citation. It says "Zotero and Google Docs You likely ended up here by clicking on a citation created by Zotero in a Google Doc. To safely edit the document, you should install the Zotero Connector for your browser."
If someone could help and tell me how to link citations to the web link instead of library

adamsmith · November 2, 2023

Sorry, you can't. What you're seeing is just a byproduct of the only way Google docs allows Zotero to insert live references. Citations created in other word processors are never linked to anything (and the Gdoc ones only contain those useless -- for humans -- links).
Bibliography entries, of course, can contain URLs or DOIs formatted as URLs and that'd be the standard way of doing this for references.

dstillman · November 4, 2023

But @andyrandria may just be misunderstanding this. You should never really encounter those links in normal usage:

1) If you're editing the document yourself in Google Docs, you should have the Zotero Connector installed, in which case you won't see them (because you'll get the "Edit in Zotero" popup instead).

2) If you're editing the document with Zotero in some other word processor, you should have followed the process to move the document between word processors while keeping the Zotero citations active.

3) If you just downloaded the file (e.g., for submission), you should always do File → "Make a copy" first, unlink citations in that copy, and download that. And in fact, Zotero will try to warn you if you use one of the download options in Google Docs with active citations still in the document (though it can only do that if you've interacted with the plugin in that Google Docs session).

So if you're seeing these links, you're likely doing something wrong to begin with.