Bibliography has disappeared and everything crashes

annab2022

I wrote my thesis using Word for Mac version 16.69.1. My Mac OS is 11.6. The document is 430 pages and used to contain a 100-page bibliography. Now when I open the document, it says, "Automatic citations are disabled, click Refresh to generate..." etc. When I click Refresh, nothing happens. When I click "Add/Edit Bibliography", nothing happens. Usually Word and/or Zotero freeze simultaneously and I start all over. When I click "Add/Edit Citation" I get the beachball of doom but it goes away after about 10 seconds and I can add a new citation. I know the doc is way too big and my computer can't handle it, but I need to be able to make a few edits to the references and generate a new bibliography so I can submit it next week. I updated Word today. I re-started my computer. I tried this on another (much newer) computer but it didn't work there either. I copied and pasted into a new document, same result. Please help! (If it's possible to share instructions using simple language I would really appreciate it. I have a hard time following 90% of the advice in this forum and I'm fairly computer savvy.)

adamsmith

Are you able to try this on a Windows computer? The Word for Mac/Zotero connection is notoriously slow, so things are just going to be painful for a document of that size. Otherwise, the recommendation would be to refresh/add bibliography and be very patient (i.e. expect to wait for several hours, not a couple of minutes)

annab2022

Thanks a lot for the very quick reply. Ok I will try that. I can borrow a computer. In the meantime, I will try again on my Mac and leave it running. Do I delete the text that says: "Automatic citation updates are disabled. To see the bibliography, click Refresh in the Zotero tab"? Is it better to click Refresh or "Add/Edit Bibliography"? (I thought Refresh would try to go through every single citation, which would be longer??)

adamsmith

I think add bibliography will refresh anyway, so cancel the refresh and just add the bibliography

dstillman

No, Refresh is correct here. "Automatic citation updates are disabled. To see the bibliography, click Refresh in the Zotero tab." is the bibliography placeholder — when automatic citation updates are disabled, the visible text is just changed to that message if you've made citation changes since the last refresh. So @annab2022, when you're done making changes, you should do what it says and click Refresh.

(Since you already have the bibliography placeholder in the document, Add/Edit Bibliography will pop up the Edit Bibliography window. Clicking OK in that window would in fact be equivalent to pressing Refresh, but you have to wait for that window to appear in the first place, which could potentially take a while, and if you click Cancel by mistake then it doesn't refresh. So there's no reason to click Add/Edit Bibliography in this situation — just click Refresh.)