half of my citations were deleted

MelanieBruenger
Hello,

Since yesterday half of my citations are gone. It didn't happened to me for the first time but until yesterday there were always just a few citations gone so that I looked them up again. Yesterday on 15 pages of Quotes the citations went missing and I don't know what to do or what I did wrong. I am relative new to Zotero and I am using Word 365 on a Macbook.

I already updated Zotero.

I am thankful for any help!
  • dstillman
    Not totally clear what you mean, but I'd guess that you're saving the file in the wrong format: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/existing_citations_not_detected
  • MelanieBruenger
    thank you for your comment. I saved it in the format .docx as it says in the link you send. so that is not the problem I think.

    maybe to be more concrete: I have a document where I added my notes from Zotero. in this notes there are the quotes with the citations in brackets after the quotes. Since yesterday on some of the pages the citations are missing and I only have the quotes. I think it's since I deleted a note that I didn't finished inserting. so it looked like this: {Citation} and I deleted it.
  • MelanieBruenger
    I still need support with this problem...Does anyone know where I can get help with it?
  • dstillman
    Deleting a "{Citation}" placeholder shouldn't affect other citations in the document, but you also shouldn't be deleting that manually — that should only appear if the citation dialog is open, so if you see "{Citation}", you should look for an open citation dialog behind your other windows and Esc out of it properly.

    By "added my notes" do you mean that you used the Add Note button?

    Can you send the document in question to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread, and provide an example citation that you're referring to?
  • dstillman
    We got the document, but you didn't answer my question above. Are you referring to the Add Note button?

    Do you have a copy of the file from when the citations were there?

    I don't recall any other reports of many citations in a document being completely deleted without a trace. @adomasven could comment on whether there's anything that could conceivably cause this.
  • MelanieBruenger
    Oh, i am sorry that I forgot. Yes, I am referring to the Add Note button.

    yes I have a copy of the file when some of the citations were still there, but not all of them. Should I send it too?

    Thank you for your help
  • MelanieBruenger
    I need to correct myself. In the older documents the citations are also missing now.
  • adomasven
    edited 28 days ago
    Per Dan's comment Existing Citations Not Detected is relevant. Given that the citations are unlinked halfway through the document you should think whether you transfered this document at some point in the past via Google Drive or save it in some incompatible format in the past. You will have to manually reinsert the citations that are not detected. You should enable field shading in Word settings -> View under "Field shading". Set that to Always. That way you will be able to visually identify which citations are linked, and which one are not.
  • MelanieBruenger
    Thank you for your comment.

    I didn't transferred the document via google drive and I only saved it as a .docx.

    What can I do so that it doesn't' happen again?
  • dstillman
    edited 28 days ago
    Are you asking about missing citations or flattened citations? It looks like you have flattened citations in your document, but in your email and above you seem to be referring to citations that are missing completely. Existing Citations Not Detected would be relevant for flattened citations — and you would almost certainly be forgetting something you (or someone you exchanged the document with) did. But completely missing citations would be a different (and much stranger) issue.
  • MelanieBruenger
    i am asking about missing citations. In my Document there are no citations after the Quotes, so that no one knows where it is from. I have an Screenshot attached here where you can see that the quote on the top has no citation. But it should have a citation like the two at the end of the page.

    I work alone on this document and I really only saved it as a docx.

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u16215580/xbsqsls3saapioha1fgu.png
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