“Citation Error” in Word

Support
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#1

Hi everyone,
I’m using the Paperpile for Word plugin on both a Macbook Pro and a Dell XPS 13 running Windows. The plugin has been a disaster pretty consistently, as it freezes all the time and I have to force quit out of Word multiple times a session on both machines, but I lived with it because I had no real choice given how deep into using Paperpile for my dissertation I am. Today the plugin broke in a new and unique way: all of my hundreds of citations now say “(Citation error)”. Paperpile support isn’t available until Monday and I need to turn this in by Tuesday, and I know others have experienced the issue (though the threads were all closed with no resolutions being posted). I am hoping someone here can help me rescue a file that is very important to me.

Thanks,
Patrick

#2

Thanks for reaching out here as well, @fogarty22. As we’ve been discussing via chat, there appear to be underlying issues with the particular document which we’ve so far been unable to determine a source for. Still looking into it.

Should anybody else face a similar problem - @fogarty22 found that restoring a previous version of the document (from before the error he reported appeared) and making a copy proved to be an adequate solution, making citations editable once more.

#3

I want to follow up to say that this issue occurred a) in a document in iCloud and b) while two people were simultaneously editing the document. I suspect one or both of these factors contributed to my problem, but I can’t confirm that in any meaningful way.

One thing I am now doing is saving versions and duplicating the file at the end of the editing day and storing that version locally. Good backup practices are more often than not the solution to software problems. If you’ve come across this issue and I can be of service, don’t hesitate to reach out via this forum.

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