unlinked cites

Lcc16g
Hi!

I’ve been working on a large document in Google Docs and have inserted around 120 citations using Zotero. Since the document was becoming very slow, I followed a suggestion to improve performance by unlinking the citations via “Document Preferences.”

Later, I decided to re-link the citations to continue working as usual, but I’ve encountered a problem: while I can insert new citations just fine, all my previous ones remain unlinked and appear in red. I’m not able to restore or re-link them automatically. The only option available seems to be updating each citation manually, which would mean redoing all 120 of them.

Is there any way to recover and re-link the previously inserted citations without having to reinsert each one individually? Any help or guidance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
  • adamsmith
    Relinking is not possible, no (not sure why you thought it would be: the warning Zotero displays is pretty stark).
    I'm afraid the only options are checking for a.back-up.of the document prior to unlinking or indeed manually re-inserting each citation.
  • Lcc16g
    Well, I did it because that's what Zotero recommended itself, when citation insertion stopped working due to the file being too large. In fact, when you want to switch between word processors (for example, from Google Docs to Word), it also advises you to unlink the citations, download the document, and then relink them once you open it in Word (which, by the way, I haven’t managed to do either). So, I understand it’s a reversible process in some way... Anyway, thank you very much for your response. I guess I’ll have to relink the citations one by one.
  • damnation
    Out of interest, where does it say so?
    On the transfering word processors guide the word "unlink" does not exist:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/moving_documents_between_word_processors

    It actually warns you that you should follow the procedure as you can otherwise LOSE the citation links:
    If you use the Zotero word processor plugin to add citations to your document and then open the document in another word processor, the Zotero citation links will be lost.
  • adamsmith
    And for slow documents, the standard recommendation is not to unlink but to disable automatic updating (which is a setting in the Document preferences).
    Even on this forum, basically anytime someone says "unlink your citations" it is followed by "in a copy of the document" to prevent exactly this scenario.

    So I'm sorry this happened and you have to redo the citations, but this isn't due to following any Zotero-provided instructions.
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