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
    2019-01-10T22:01:36+00:00

    This is the answer from Mendeley team, it may help someone:

    "We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Please be informed that this has been identified by our development team as a bug. Basically, the error occurs when there is 'Index' inserted on the document. They are currently working on a fix but has not given any estimated time of completion. As soon as the patch has been developed, it will be included in the next version of Mendeley Desktop.

    For the meantime we can only provide a workaround.

    A. Remove Index on your document, insert citations and then insert Index.

    B. Insert a citation on a blank document.

    Copy paste the citation on the existing or old document."

    Unfortunately the workaround is not an option for me having a very large document plenty of mendeley-citations. Seems like waiting for the next version will be the only solution for me.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-02-16T19:29:52+00:00

    Also working on my dissertation and this totally fixed it!! I also originally used EndNote then switched to Mendeley and had the problem arise after Mendeley's most recent update (Jan 2019).

    I used Alt-F9 to see the field codes, search for "endnote", found the one field code that was still remaining from Endnote, deleted the whole field code for this citation, then the problem was solved. Thank you my fellow nerds!

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-12-21T16:46:01+00:00

    Same problem; after the last update.

    It turned out I had some fragments of old "ADDIN EN" strings from endnote. I deleted them.

    But there were still some old citations that were blocking the program. However, when the error message pops up, mendely redirects your cursor to the citations responsable for the disruption.

    Deleted each of them and it went back to normal.

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