Changing document type seems to break link to citation in Google Docs

After some confusion, I think I’ve figured out that, if you change a document type in the Paperpile interface, then any further edits will not be synced to any Google Docs in which that document is used as a reference.

This might be the intended behavior, but I think it would be good to document this on the help/FAQ page. I had puzzled for a while about why my edits were not being synced to my Google Doc. In the end I reestablished the link by completely deleting the references from the Google Doc (including from the “all references” page) and then adding them again.

I discovered this while changing the document type I had used to categorise some grey literature, but I guess it could also apply to changing from “preprint manuscript” to “journal article” once an article has been published.

We’ll look into that. We routinely test that chaning the meta data indeed updates the citation in Gooogle Docs but these tests don’t include the document type. So you might have found a bug here. Thanks.