Here is my situation: I had a reference for a journal article, but I discovered that the journal name was wrong and the URLs were wrong. For some reason (a different bug), I could not delete the URLs; I would hit save, and it would just keep listing them. So I deleted the entire item and recreated it. However, the old information kept showing up in my document, even after multiple close/open, refresh paperpile; I tried everything I could think of. The paper was correct in the paperpile window, but I couldn’t get my document to list its information correctly.
Then, I discovered when I went to “view all references” in my document, the old paper information was still listed! And there’s no delete button. Deleting all references in the document makes it disappear from bibliography, but it’s still there under “view all references,” and it won’t respect the new library item. I don’t know if it’s confused because the paper name and author names are the same, but everything else is different. I just can’t convince it to forget the old item and let me use the new one. It’s driving me crazy.
I was finally able to work around this by creating a new item and intentionally messing up the name of the article and then citing it from the document (so it found the new item), and then changing the name back to the correct name. This fixed everything in the document, but the “view all references” still lists the old and wrong item as well as the new one. And when I go to insert a new citation and type the article name, both choices come up (even though the old/wrong one doesn’t even exist in paperpile any longer).
I think it would be nice to have a delete function for references that are in a document under “view all references” so that we can manually manage this type of thing when it goes haywire. Thanks.
We’ll add a delete function, that makes lot of sense.
The behaviour you describe is intentional though. The references in a Google Doc are a copy of your reference in Paperpile. If you delete a reference in Paperpile it’s not deleted from your Google Doc. That is necessary to make the model work in a multi-user scenario.
The bug with the re-appearing URLs should have been fixed already. I’ll ping Andreas to double check, it might be fixed but not released yet.
We have added a way to delete references from a Google Document (use the Delete link, see image). We also fixed the bug that caused the problems when deleting URLs from an item.
