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
    2019-02-10T02:25:32+00:00

    Solved the issue.

    Updated mendeley, followed the ADDIN description found above. Added missing references to the mendeley library and then went through the text, deleting trouble-makers (adding yellow highlighted text temporarily, as you can't use mendeley at this stage). After the manuscript was clear (as in 'references refresh' did not give error messages) I could add all back from mendeley, deleted the highlighted notes and refreshed the library. Done for me. This was an old manuscript.

    Looks like some earlier accepted mendeley references were not up to standard.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-12-18T15:17:34+00:00

    I had the same problem but in my thesis where cutting and pasting hundreds of entries (and re-inserting references wasn't an option).

    I simply uninstalled Mendeley (with Revo uninstall) and re-installed an older version and its working fine again.

    Bug with the new update I guess?

    Aidan

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  3. Charles Kenyon 171K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2018-12-14T19:59:21+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

    If you just want to complain, that's OK.

    Check with Mendeley and see if they have an update.

    Make sure you are using the latest version of Word.

    If you want help, start a new thread giving details of your problem.

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    2 people found this answer helpful.
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