Citation Numbering and Duplication Issues in Word Document with Zotero
Dear Zotero Support Team,
I’m experiencing an issue when using Zotero for citations in Microsoft Word. Specifically:
When multiple users collaborate on a document and insert citations, I often receive a message saying that the citation fields are in conflict.
As a result, some citations get duplicated multiple times within the same sentence or paragraph.
After manually deleting the duplicated citations, all citation numbers in the document reset to (1), rather than updating correctly.
Additionally, we are using Word’s “Track Changes” feature for collaboration. Could this be contributing to the issue?
Could you please advise how to resolve this problem and prevent citation duplication or numbering errors when collaborating on Word documents with Zotero?
Thank you in advance for your help.
I’m experiencing an issue when using Zotero for citations in Microsoft Word. Specifically:
When multiple users collaborate on a document and insert citations, I often receive a message saying that the citation fields are in conflict.
As a result, some citations get duplicated multiple times within the same sentence or paragraph.
After manually deleting the duplicated citations, all citation numbers in the document reset to (1), rather than updating correctly.
Additionally, we are using Word’s “Track Changes” feature for collaboration. Could this be contributing to the issue?
Could you please advise how to resolve this problem and prevent citation duplication or numbering errors when collaborating on Word documents with Zotero?
Thank you in advance for your help.
Track changes should generally work fine (Zotero's Word add-on disables track changes during citation insertion)
Thank you for your reply.
The message I received was in Korean and included the word "conflict," so I’m not sure what the exact English version would be. After that message appeared, every new citation I inserted started showing up with citation number 1, regardless of where I placed it in the document.
I suspect this issue may have occurred because multiple people were editing the document and inserting Zotero citations at the same time. To address this, I’ve created a copy of the Word document and am now working on that version. I’m planning to insert the citations only in the final version to avoid further issues.
Is there a way to resolve the citation numbering issue or prevent this from happening again?
Thank you!
One way or another, it sounds like you ended up with flattened citations. See Existing Citations Not Detected. We're not aware of anything related to SharePoint that causes that, but it's possible someone else edited the document in some way that broke it.