Zotero changed all my Citation Keys

rtld1g13 · 2026-03-14T18:52:54+00:00

All of my Zotero entries were defined with a fixed Citation Key entry in the Extras field. Suddenly these are all gone and Zotero has constructed new keys.

This has totally wrecked my PhD thesis which referenced the old Citation Keys.

Is there any way to recover from this, and how can this happen without any user interaction. It is absolutely catastrophic.

rtld1g13 · 2026-03-14T19:06:20+00:00

I probably have the old Zotero database in a Time Machine backup, but need to understand how this happened to prevent it immediately being overwritten with the altered data which has been synced to Zotero cloud

adamsmith · 2026-03-14T19:14:36+00:00

This is all BetterBibTeX -- report on the GitHub and ask for advice there. Pinned cite keys should have been migrated

rtld1g13 · 2026-03-14T19:43:15+00:00

Hi Adam. Thanks for replying. I noticed that the actual Zotero entries have a new Citation Key element, would BetterBibTex have been involved in populating that? I thought it was an export only plug in?

adamsmith · 2026-03-14T19:56:31+00:00

Yes. Zotero never generates cite keys except on export

rtld1g13 · 2026-03-14T20:35:40+00:00

Ok, So one additional question, What happened to the Extras field that contained the original “Citation Key: xxx” entries?. Will I be able to get that back from a backup?

adamsmith · 2026-03-14T20:47:52+00:00

They should have migrated to Zotero's Citation key field -- I can't say why it didn't or what best way to restore from backup. BBT support is really in a better position to help

rtld1g13 · 2026-03-16T07:42:18+00:00

I updated Zotero and BBT to latest versions, then restored the sqlite databases from a stable point, and this time got a prompt to migrate the data, which has worked.

emilianoeheyns · 2026-03-16T15:37:02+00:00

I make no excuses for the unrest I caused with the BBT key migration, but to be precise -- BBT did not migrate the citation keys from the extra field, which some may think as "removing pinned keys".

The concept of pinned keys has just mostly gone away now that there is a native citation key field. For people that *really* like their keys dynamic, BBT offers a fallback, but the default is to fill empty keys and then to leave them alone.