Bibliography stopped updating in Mac Word

CrystalHong
MacOS 12.7.1
Microsoft 365 subscription | Word for Mac 16.79.1
Zotero 6.0.30

I've completely deleted and reinstalled Zotero on my computer and Zotero plugin on Word. I've also manually edited all the citations again. But I still can't refresh the citations or insert a bibliography.The warning message is "Zotero integration error. Zotero experienced an error updating your document."

Can anyone help?
  • adomasven
    You have to follow the Troubleshooting Errors in Word Processor Documents steps.
  • CrystalHong
    I followed all the steps but it still doesn’t work!
  • dstillman
    edited December 21, 2023
    You haven't followed all the steps. The whole point of the last step is that it will by definition isolate the problematic part and also let you provide an excerpt of the document for further troubleshooting. You haven't even provided the Report ID the page asks for, so we don't even know what error you're getting.
  • CrystalHong
    The problem is I reinserted all the citations and regenerated the bibliography. But all of a sudden the bibliography was converted into text and stopped auto-updating. I’m using fields mode. I can see that all the citations are fields but the bibliography is pure text.
  • adomasven
    Remove the bibliography text from your document and press Add/Edit Bibliography in the Zotero tab in Word. If citations and bibliography keep unlinking, see Existing Citations Not Detected.
  • CrystalHong
    I now added the bibliography again and found out the problematic citations. I deleted and reinserted those citations, then the issues came up again. It seems that I can't insert those citations with Zotero. I just have to manually type them in. How stupid is that!!

    How can I identify problematic citations in the future? They appear normal in my Zotero library.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited December 22, 2023
    Please calm down and recognize that the lead developer of Zotero and a senior staffer are trying to help. The forum has rules about being polite. Trust and respect their advice. They care about the user experience and try to help.

    No, you need not manually type them in. That would, indeed, be "stupid ". Hand typing references in a Zotero/Word document will only make matters worse. Many thousands of people successfully use Zotero with Word for Mac. Probably more than 100 thousand. Something unusual happened with your document and experts are trying to help. From what I can discern, there are several million Zotero users across the world and you should realize that busy developers hold the wellbeing of each user as of sufficient importance that they take time away from writing code to help individuals who have problems.

    If you follow adomasven 's instructions and respond with an excerpt and ReportID someone here can show you how to repair your document.
  • CrystalHong
    I can’t get the excerpt or reportID. Just now I used Zotero to insert the problematic citations again. I could generate the bibliography. But the problematic citations stayed unchanged (raw) with underlines.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited December 27, 2023
    I'll try one more time because you are clearly so extremely frustrated that you aren't thinking clearly.

    As adomasven said:
    You have to follow the Troubleshooting Errors in Word Processor Documents steps. Do this systematically and you will absolutely resolve your problem. You are leaving out steps. Don't take a shortcut because you think something is obvious. You will fail if you don't exactly follow the steps. You will succeed when you follow the steps.

    When you first asked for help you didn't mention underlines.
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