Converting a manuscript’s citations from APA 7 to Chicago Notes & Bibliography in Word with Zotero 6, I’m seeing inconsistent short titles and misplaced commas in footnotes across roughly 120 references. What is your most reliable workflow to normalize punctuation, italics, and shortened note forms without a manual pass — CSL tweak, document preferences, or a cleanup macro — on a 48‑hour deadline?
I hit the same thing after flipping APA→Chicago; the cleanest fix was to install the “Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed. (full note, without Ibid.)” variant, clone it in the CSL Visual Editor (Visual CSL Editor), set a single delimiter on the note macro, then switch styles APA→Chicago→APA once to force a hard refresh. That standardized commas, italics, and shortened notes across about 120 footnotes for me; the only caveat was adding a Short Title to a couple ambiguous items. If stragglers remain, @adamsmith’s “switch styles before unlinking” trick works like a punctuation reset.
One thing that saved me on a 120-ref doc: do an ODT round-trip with ODF Scan so Zotero rebuilds every footnote from clean metadata; it nuked the “misplaced commas” and fixed italics without me touching CSL. @emma9026’s variant is solid, but for me the ODF pass was more reliable than a cleanup macro; plugins [Zotero Documentation]. Caveat: you’ll lose any manual tweaks in notes, so run it on a copy, .
Switching the citation language did the trick for me: in Zotero’s Document Preferences choose English (US) instead of Default, then Refresh, and my commas/italics plus the subsequent-note forms snapped into line across a long doc. If Word’s proofing language is set to UK, flip that too to avoid clashing punctuation; steps: word_processor_plugin_usage [Zotero Documentation].
Building on @isabella_r56’s language tip, I cloned the CMOS full‑note CSL, set “default-locale=“en-US”” in the header, reselected it, and a Refresh pulled everything into line — like forcing everyone to use the same dictionary. Small caveat: it won’t override per‑citation language or messy item metadata; quick edit here: Visual CSL Editor.
If Track Changes was on when you added the notes, accept all changes and hit Refresh — that alone fixed my “comma drift” in Chicago; if not, briefly switch to any other style, Refresh, then switch back to force a clean rebuild (like reseating a loose cable). Zotero’s debugging steps are here: kb:debugging_broken_documents [Zotero Documentation].
I ran into this with about 120 refs in Word using Zotero 6; batch-filling the “Short Title” field (Zutilo) for anything that needs a shortened note, then reselecting “Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (full note)” and Refresh, normalized the shortened notes and cleared up the stray commas/italics… Small caveat: legal cases and newspaper articles sometimes need a custom short title to avoid odd comma placement.