Troubleshooting Zotero

Just like any other apps, Zotero has its quirks. Here are some little annoyances that you may just be willing to put up with, in exchange for some psychic reward of seeing your work organized, archived, or analyzed in the same place.

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This may happen when you open Zotero:

It has something to do, among others, with Javascript not loading properly. Well, it says restart Zotero! Not exactly troubleshooting. It's just that you wish the trooble to go away.

This means you have synced attachments that are on different folders. This is eventually unavoidable as you work from different computers with Zotero installation.

Non-solution solution: try to be as consistent as possible with your storage space. A cloud-based storage accessible from all computers with your Zotero installation might work.

Of course you have the following option

under Preferences | Files and Folders. But the proviso ““as long as the file structure within the base directory remains the same” is easier said than done, especially as you use different devices with different operating systems (OS).

No explanation given by Zotero. It just occured. So just yield: restart Zotero!

This comes with the use of the Zotero plugin for MS Word, when a citation (footnote or endnote) is entered into the document.

The “clean” solution here is just to restart Zotero stand-alone and then MS Word.

You mush have used Zotero cloud to sync your source files. When linking an entry's metadata to source file, use “Attach link to file” or “Attach link to URL” instead of “Attached stored copy of file.”

Papermachines is a Zotero plugin for analyzing your corpus.

Trouble: The output analysis doesn't show or pop up. Shoot: look for the output file itself from the plugin directory. On Mac, it looks something like this:

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Zotero/Profiles/5x9iaxng.default/zotero/papermachines/out

The output file itself may look like this: wordcloud3601908C233-f4fb095.html

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