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
    2018-12-19T04:17:36+00:00

    I have searched all over for a solution and sent in the issue to Mendeley about the error "citation/ bibliography is wrongly placed in index area, please delete the placed citation/ bibliography in index area." This all occurred after an update and affects all previous versions of this document where it was fine.

    I have tried looking for a standalone {ADDIN} or ADDIN or XE and found none in my document. I still tried to delete all the ADDIN words in my document anyways and i get the error "Use the "Insert Citation" button to add citations to this document."

    To make a long story short, I stumbled across some peculiar words that had "Endnote...." By deleting entire entries****of 5 of them and { ADDIN EN.CITE { ADDIN EN.CITE.DATA }} the plugin has miraculously decided to work again and generates the Bibliography! From here i will check what I removed but it looks like i solved it.

    Hope this helps everyone!

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-12-13T19:44:49+00:00

    Hi Eva385

    What do you mean by "i just deleted all the linked index for the abbreviations". This issue is driving me insane.

    Regards,

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-12-14T19:45:49+00:00

    This issue is really annoying. Every time I use an index created on my own, I cannot use Mendeley any more.

    Well to remove all manually created indices is possible, but not really a good solution.

    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

    Was this answer helpful?

    5 people found this answer helpful.
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