Citations not going across to bibliography

RedDwarf
I noticed today that a couple of my citations that are in my footnotes have not populated into my bibliography. I did the usual delete the bibliography from my document, close Word and Zotero, reopen them and then clicked Add Bibliography in Word but the problem persisted. On closer examination I have noticed that the ones that aren’t populating into the bibliography do not have the citation preview at the top of the Zotero info pane. I dug deeper and discovered it is only occurring with some item types. So far, the ones I have identified are: document, email, interview, manuscript, and conference paper. These have never been an issue in the past. Further other citations created under the same item type e.g. document, are populating. Does anyone have any other troubleshooting methods I can try to resolve this please?
  • damnation
    In a fresh document, with just one of the problematic citations, does it work?
    Also, which citation style. Certain styles can exclude certain items/variable combinations from the bibliography.
  • RedDwarf
    edited September 15, 2025
    Good evening
    A clean document has the same issue. I am using Chicago 18 (notes and bibliography, subsequent ibid.)
    This is only a new issue wasn't happening previously
  • damnation
    Our Chicago styles received a major overhaul recently thanks to @adunning. He'll be able to explain better.
  • RedDwarf
    Okay thank you. I keep an eye out for a response :)
  • ef0822
    I have also had this problem. I use MHRA and the bibliography is no longer being populated with citations that are "interview" types. It was not a problem until a month or so again.

    Any suggestions?
  • dunning
    edited 22 days ago
    The Chicago Manual specifies a number of cases in which entries should appear in the notes only: classical works without publication information; unsigned reference entries (CMOS18 14.132); personal communications including letters and interviews that have no means for the reader to retrieve them (14.13, 14.111); inaccessible manuscripts (14.114); unpublished conference papers (14.115); private documents (14.118); and social media content (14.106). For example, an interview should only appear in the bibliography if it is published or includes an archival reference.

    MHRA are less specific about which items should be included in the bibliography, but they tend to follow the Oxford Guide to Style, which gives very similar guidance to Chicago in this area. I spoke with one of the MHRA editors a couple of months ago who thought it sensible to follow the same approach.
  • RedDwarf
    Okay. I ended up manually going through every single footnote to ensure there was a corresponding bibliography entry. My uni has their own style which is similar to Chicago but not quite and we're expected to put these unusual ones in the bibliography.
  • dunning
    It is possible that your instructors simply haven't noticed this detail. While it is explicit in both Chicago and Turabian that not every citation needs a corresponding bibliography entry, you can see from the list of references in my last post that there isn't a single section to explain this. Worse, there are ambiguous situations such as web pages that 'can usually be cited in the text or in a note rather than in a bibliography' (CMOS18 14.104) but there are unspecified situations where one might apparently wish to do so, since they still provide a model bibliography entry for a web page (by contrast they removed the bibliography example for social media in 14.106 with the 18th edition). Working out Chicago's precise expectations and mapping them onto in Zotero involved a great deal of interpretation.

    If you are editing the CSL style file, it is straightforward to remove the bibliography filtering mechanism: simply replace the various conditionals within the <layout> element within the bibliography at the end of the file with a simple <text macro="bibliography-notes"/> reference.
  • RedDwarf
    No my uni department literally made up their own style!
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