Help! All of my in-text citations VANISHED

T4Marie · 2025-09-26T23:54:05+00:00

I have been working on a paper for several months. The last thing I did before submitting it was add my bibliography.
When I opened it up a week later, I saw that all of my in-text citations were gone!!!
The bibliography is there - but... no in-text citations

dstillman · 2025-09-27T03:23:04+00:00

Gone as in flattened or gone as in missing? I'm not sure we've ever seen citations go missing before. That would have to be some tool that actively stripped out (or didn't support) Word field codes. It's much more common for tools to treat them as plain text as flatten them.

dstillman · 2025-09-27T03:24:02+00:00

But also, is the bibliography flattened, or is it still active? What happens if you click the plugin's Refresh button? Does the bibliography remain?

T4Marie · 2025-09-29T15:08:18+00:00

They were gone - not flattened - very weird.
Refresing did nothing.

So, I made a copy, then deleted the bibliography, re-entered some of my citations and tried to add another bibliography.

- This time, I couldn't.

I followed the instructions I found on-line ( but have since not been able to relocate them). They directed me to look inside the Zotero app on my hard drive and check to see if a certain element was present - it turned out to be missing.
No idea how that could have happened!!

I uninstalled/reinstalled Zotero, and it seems to be working fine.
I did have to go back and re-cite my 5000 word paper - (painful)

dstillman · 2025-09-29T15:15:54+00:00

I followed the instructions I found on-line ( but have since not been able to relocate them). They directed me to look inside the Zotero app on my hard drive and check to see if a certain element was present - it turned out to be missing.

Not sure what you're referring to here, but nothing in Zotero itself should ever cause citations to disappear, and I'm not aware of any similar reports.