I just made an unpleasant discovery and wanted to share it.
Some time ago I installed Zotero on my Mac, wanting to see if it could help me in the correcting of citations, a small but tedious part of my job. As part of that installation, I guess it got installed into Word as some kind of plug-in? To be honest I don’t know how it got into Word, but it has its own ribbon section. I fiddled around with the app a bit but it didn’t seem to promise too much help with the reference lists that I get from others, so I forgot about it.
Anyway, my normal workflow is to get book chapters from a number of contributors, edit the files, then drop the final Word files into ID. Been doing this for like 10 years.
Today I happened to notice that, in one chapter, a bunch of text that wasn’t part of the actual Word file had mysteriously manifested itself in ID. The text related to a reference source. After some fiddling I determined that it somehow came from Zotero. A field code, a bookmark, I’m not sure what.
My guess is that the people who worked on this chapter used Zotero to manage references and because it is installed into my version of Word, it read in the data, and somehow this got outputted when I loaded the Word file into ID. Luckily, the text stood out because it wasn’t properly punctuated.
I usually run a script in Word to remove all bookmarks before I place into ID and maybe that has saved me in the past. I neglected to remove them for this chapter.
Anyway, I wanted to post this as both a warning and a question–anyway familiar with Zotero know the mechanism at work here?
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