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. Paul Edstein 82,871 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2018-12-10T21:44:56+00:00

    It appears you're trying to insert your bibliography within the range spanned by an INDEX field; you need to insert it before or after that field. Click in the INDEX and press Shift-F9 to reveal the field code, then insert your bibliography before the { or after the }.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-12-10T22:05:31+00:00

    i didnt change anything with the bibliography... what index is meant?

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  3. Paul Edstein 82,871 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2018-12-11T04:56:27+00:00

    Have you added an Index to the document? You cannot place a citation or bibliography there; neither can you Index content in a citation or bibliography. If not, or that is not what you're trying to do, perhaps you could upload a document demonstrating the issue to OneDrive (delete anything sensitive) and post a link here.

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