Track Changes is a way for Microsoft Word to keep track of the changes you make to a document. You can then choose to accept or reject those changes. This feature is particularly useful when writing a single document collaboratively.

It is highly recommended to let CiteSmart temporarily disable this function when interacting with the active document (menu Edit>Preferences>MS Word). If Track Changes is on, then CiteSmart will turn it off only when interacting with the document (i.e inserting references, formatting them, creating the bibliographic index etc...). Once done, CiteSmart will turn Track Changes back on.

Generally speaking, it is better to avoid tracking changes when inserting and more importantly deleting references. As an example let's imagine that in a word document 4 references are inserted: (1)(2)(3)(4). Now while Track Changes is on, a user deletes (4). The bibliographic index will still contain 4 references. Although the reference has been deleted from the text, it is still part of the document story. CiteSmart still sees it, and the bibliographic index will look like:

• (1) article 1 ...
• (2) article 2 ...
• (3) article 3 ...
• (4) article 4 ...

There are other problems that may be encountered like citation fusionning and formatting problems to name a few. For all these reasons, keep Track Changes off as much as possible, and if not, avoid deleting references inserted with CiteSmart while changes are tracked.