Hi everyone,
I’ve been struggling with a persistent issue in Google Docs for the past two days and haven’t been able to resolve it.
In my manuscript, all in-text citations were inserted using the Paperpile extension. However, when I try to generate the bibliography, the following problems occur:
- When I click “Format citations”, the bibliography doesn’t update correctly and sometimes returns an error.
- When I go to Extensions → Paperpile → Manage citations → Update citations and bibliography , the bibliography is generated—but it includes every reference in my Paperpile library , not just the ones actually cited in the document.
This means my bibliography becomes extremely long and inaccurate. I’ve checked multiple times to make sure all in-text citations were inserted via Paperpile (not manually typed), but the problem persists.
I’m not sure whether this is a sync or metadata issue. I’ve also noticed that some of my Chinese-language references, which I manually translated into English inside Paperpile, still appear in Chinese when synced to Google Docs.
Has anyone experienced this before or found a fix? Any suggestions from the Paperpile team would be greatly appreciated.
Welcome to our forum, @Zhengrui_Qiu, and thank you for reporting. Could you please let us know what error message appears when you click Format citations and share a screenshot?
In the Google Docs menu, go to Paperpile > View all references — you’ll see all the references that Paperpile has inserted in your document. Try deleting the ones you don’t need from there, then reformat your citations.
A few additional things to check that can affect the plugin’s performance:
- If your document uses tabs, please cite only in the first tab — we’re still working on supporting multiple tabs.
- If your document is in another format (such as
.docx), go to File > Save as Google Docs, then try formatting again.
- If you’re using or have used Suggesting mode, make sure to accept all changes and format citations only while in Editing mode.
As shown in the attached image, the same issue occurs every time I click “Format Citations.”
Thank you for sharing the screenshot, @Zhengrui_Qiu. Can you try creating and formatting citations in a new Google Doc? If that works, copy the contents of your original document into a new one and try formatting again.
If the issue persists, please share the document with us by emailing support@paperpile.com or via the in-app messenger.
