Citations lost after trying to format footnotes

Support
#1

I wrote a paper that used Paperpile citations in the footnotes, and after trying to assign the “Heading 6” format to the footnote all my citations were entirely overwritten with the first citation. Now, when I “Format Citations,” I get the first citation then nothing but “Ibid.” for the rest of the footnotes. I tried restoring to a previous version, but the citation data appears to be gone. Fortunately, as long as I don’t do “Format Citations,” I can still use the text that’s there already. But I can’t do anything more with this paper. This is a serious problem.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to reproduce the problem. Another document seemed to accept “Heading 6” as a format without problem. I’m not sure what happened. It could have something to do with the “Footnote Style” add-on posted in this forum, which is what I was using prior to manually assigned the “Heading 6” format to the footnotes.

#2

We apologize for your trouble, this is obviously not the kind of experience we are looking for, but we also cannot account for what other add-ons may do with our citations. Thank you for highlighting this possible explanation.

Luckily, Google Docs has built-in versioning, so you can fix the loss of data by going to File --> Version history --> See version history. Then find the latest version where the citations are intact and restore that version. The “citation data” we store in the document are just links (urls) and so are very unlikely to not be saved in the document’s history.