error: citation/ bibliography is wrongly placed in index area, please delete the placed citation/ bibliography in index area

Anonymous
2018-12-10T16:43:04+00:00

Hello community,

I am having problems with word and/ or mendeley. It keeps showing me the following error: "citation/ bibliography is wrongly placed in index area, please delete the placed citation/ bibliography in index area" when trying to edit or insert a citation.

any suggestions on how to solve the problem?

Kind Regards,

Eva

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2018-12-18T19:17:06+00:00

I had the same problem, just after the update - immediately after the update.

I wasn't having any citation highlighted, but rather a Prism graph. I took someone's advice and turned on field code by pressing alt+F9. I found this bit of code: "{ ADDIN }" appended to the end of the field code for my embedded graph. Once I deleted that item the document became functional again. I just replicated the same fix in a backup version of the file I had made, it really is just that piece of code.

It looks like there are other pieces of code containing "ADDIN", based on a ctl+f search, one for each of my citations. But this { ADDIN } was the only one that was sitting alone, with nothing else in its curly braces. 

So here are the steps: 

  1. Hit ALT+F9
  2. Search for ADDIN (I didn't get a result for { ADDIN, only the letters themselves worked)
  3. Delete the search result that is { ADDIN } alone
  4. Try to refresh your bibliography to see if it's fixed!

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Anonymous
2018-12-14T11:05:17+00:00

I managed to correct the error. Hope it will help others.

Every time I received the window with an error, Word was pointing on a particular piece of text with some citation that has a mistake (too bad it's not highlighted). You need to identify which citation is corrupted and delete it (just copy different parts of your text into a new word document + compile bibliography again, so that way you can eliminate the corrupted citation).

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-01-24T11:21:56+00:00

    How can I do it with Mac?

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-01-21T15:44:38+00:00

    I have had this problem, twice, with Mendeley and Word (when trying to add or edit citations I got the ""citation/bibliography is wrongly placed in an index area..." error message).  Both times were with collaborative projects where text from a collaborator was put into our document which had embedded Mendeley codes.

    IN MY CASE I have identified that the problem is that text from a collaborator with embedded EndNote codes was inserted into our document. There may be other situations that cause this same error.

    The first time I deleted and re inserted all the citations, which was a pain.

    A slightly less difficult method was to just replace the Endnote citations.

    To resolve I had to

    1. find the Endnote citations, by pressing ALT+F9 to reveal all codes and then doing a text search for  "EN.CITE"   
    2. for each one I put in a comment (Review> Add comment) that said Endnote or some such thing and then I copied the PMID from the encoded information which is revealed after pressing ALT+F9.
    3. when done identifying all the endnote codes (as expected they were in one section that had been added by the collaborator)  I turned off the codes by pressing ALT+F9 again.
    4. I went through the document and manually deleted all the endnote citation (in my case they were the superscripts.  This was easier than deleted the whole embedded code while revealed)
    5. then I went through and added the references from Mendeley

    Yes still a pain in the neck. If any of you clever wizards can figure out a better way, please do.

    Better yet, if any knows a proper way of merging documents with embedded citations from two different programs that would be useful.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-01-20T08:27:27+00:00

    Ah, I am with you Abdullatif, and therefore I feel your pain. I am coming to the end of my PhD and I have exactly the same problem and it also started after I updated Mendeley. It is very frustrating and I hope it is resolved soon. It is just not that easy to remove hundreds of citations.

    Mathea

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