Consecutive citations appearing without a "-"

dbloomfield · 2025-12-02T18:48:35+00:00

I'm entering citations into a manuscript using the AMA style and when there are a string of citations, it is listing them each "23456" without commas, and without grouping them as "2-6". In the style editor, I don't see any option to correct this.

dstillman · 2025-12-02T18:52:20+00:00

Which specific AMA style, and how are you generating the citation? Can you reproduce this with right-click → Create Bibliography from Items within Zotero itself?

If you've made any changes to styles, you should reset your styles from the Advanced → Files and Folders section of the Zotero settings.

dbloomfield · 2025-12-02T18:59:13+00:00

I'm using the AMA 11th Edition Style which came with the initial download of Zotero. I've not modified any styles. I'm generating the citation using the MS Word plugin (mac) by clicking the "Add/Edit Citation" button in the ribbon.

Not sure what you mean by creating a bibliography from items within Zotero itself. When I do that, it wants to save the bibliography in a file, but I don't see how that would link to a citation in a document.

dstillman · 2025-12-02T19:05:36+00:00

This is just for debugging. Choose Citations and Copy to Clipboard, and then paste the output in a text field.

dbloomfield · 2025-12-02T19:15:03+00:00

I'm not following. Do you mean choose a reference from the library and copy it to a clipboard? When I right click a reference, I'm not seeing a "copy to clipboard" option.

Is there a Citations menu I should be looking for?

dstillman · 2025-12-02T19:16:37+00:00

Select three items, right-click, Create Items from Bibliography, choose AMA, choose Citations, choose Copy to Clipboard, click OK, and then paste the clipboard contents into a text field. What do you see?

dbloomfield · 2025-12-02T19:23:52+00:00

The references look correctly formatted.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u19018463/vo1dq4vf8iyl26l6bsro.png

dstillman · 2025-12-02T19:25:16+00:00

But that's not what we're testing. We're testing the thing that you're reporting — collapsing of consecutive citation numbers. Again, choose Citations.

dstillman · 2025-12-02T19:29:55+00:00

Wait, how exactly are you generating these citations in Word? Do you mean a multi-item citation, or just multiple citations you've inserted separately in a row? The latter will produce "23456" initially, but you just need to click Refresh, and Zotero will automatically collapse them into a multi-item citation like "2–5". (Generally you'd want to just add multiple items within a single citation on your own, including by editing existing citations, but automatic collapsing on Refresh is useful if you need to move citations around within the document and then collapse them.)

dbloomfield · 2025-12-02T19:31:05+00:00

Yes - that works. I see the citations as 1 - 4

dbloomfield · 2025-12-02T19:37:42+00:00

That worked! When I clicked on refresh, the citations collapsed. Thansk for your help.

adomasven · 2025-12-03T07:57:01+00:00

When you use the Zotero citation dialog, if you want to cite multiple items in a citation, you should add them all to the citation in the dialog. If you are using Zotero 7 with the classic citation dialog, you need to click the Multiple Sources button to do that.

Otherwise, if you insert multiple citations into the document, and then remove all space between them, Zotero will merge them for you when you refresh the document, but this isn't the intended workflow.