Old document lost citations

granto
Hi, I am trying to recover the citations I used in an old .docx from 2021. I know I saved it live because I did so for this exact purpose and named it "live citations." But only the bibliography appears live, and not the in-line citations themselves.

If I refresh, nothing changes and the bibliography remains, with live fields still present. If I click Add/Update Bibliography, I get an error popup that Zotero experienced an error updating my document.

Is there any way to recover these citations, like moving to an old zotero plugin?
  • damnation
    When you mean "recover", you mean export them them from the document to Zotero?
    You can give this a try: https://rintze.zelle.me/ref-extractor/
  • granto
    No, I just want to use the old citations in a new document, (or even simply make them live in the old document) but they have been flattened somehow, and not by me.

    Normally I would be able to copy a citation field and paste it into a new document, and it remains live, where I can generate a new bibliography. Not so here. Only the bibliography is live. It seems like a glitch because I can refresh the bibliography, and if my citations had truly been intentionally flattened, the bibliography would disappear since there is nothing to link to. But the bibliography remains live, while the in-text citations do not.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Zotero creates standard Word fields. If they're flattened, the document was saved in some format that broke them, and I'm afraid there's no option other than to reinsert them or revert to an earlier version of the document.

    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/existing_citations_not_detected
  • granto
    I definitely wish I could accept the explanation that I did something wrong as that'd make me feel better but I have only ever saved as docx and have not done anything else with this document besides open it in word. I feel like the fact that it's almost 5 years old likely has something to do with it. But yes, I am adding all the refs again, it's just taking several hours!
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    You can send the document (or an excerpt of it) to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread if you want us to take a look, but again, Zotero just uses standard Word fields, so if they’re not appearing as fields anymore, that’s by definition something that happened to the document separate from Zotero.
  • enozkan
    How sure are you, then, that the file is flattened? Have you tried showing fields to see if the bibliographic data actually disappeared (Alt+F9 on Windows, or Option+fn+F9 on a Mac)? Then, you could search for those citations in your file by searching for "ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION".
  • steinjason
    This has happened to my organization also. No change to the files. Not saved in a format that flattens them. All citations are in the document but no longer recognized/linked to zotero (they were not unlinked ever).
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited 16 days ago
    Again, you can send the document to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread if you want us to take a look. Otherwise we can't tell you more than that Zotero saves standard Word fields — the same fields you get if you insert an active date or similar using Word itself.
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