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. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-01-05T13:55:48+00:00

    If you're using a Mac, you could post in the MacWord forum. But I would guess that the corresponding Mac shortcut would be Option+F9, and https://wordmvp.com/Mac/FieldsInMacWord.html confirms this.

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  2. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-01-04T16:11:29+00:00

    Press Alt+F9 to toggle the display from field codes (what you're seeing) and field results.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-01-04T13:17:20+00:00

    Thank you very much for your solutions.

    It worked, but I still have problems with my page numbers: if I want to insert them, there will only be PAGE on the bottom of the page, not the number.

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