Switch to Zotero

ezgiuysal96

I am a PhD researcher, I started working on my thesis with mendeley using oscola, even though the new version of mendeley did not support footnotes I kept using the old one for a while but it slowed down my laptop and it caused word to shot down frequently. As a result I switched to zotero, I imported my library from mendeley to zotero it was smooth. The paper I was working at that time (lets say paper A) was written using mendeley but after I switched to zotero, I clicked the "refresh" option in zotero tab of word and I was able to write the rest of the paper using zotero and the references made were mendeley were linked to zotero.

In the meantime I deleted mendeley and my computer was back to normal, it was faster and word was working properly. After a while I went back to one of my old papers to copy a part of it to work on it for something else (lets say this paper B) Paper B was written with mendeley however the references in paper B were not refreshed and made "converted" to zotero but I copy pasted a part from paper B to another paper, paper C. Then I kept working on paper C with zotero and since then my laptop has gone crazy. It is slow, its crashes randomly, it can't even do some basic things (mostly on word) but it is also slow when word is not being used.

So I assumed the problem might have been caused by the "mendeley" references in paper B since the problem came back when I copied them and pasted paper C. I refreshed the paper B to make it "compatible" with zotero however the laptop is still very problematic. I do not know where the issue comes from in technical terms but I assume mendeley is still somehow embedded in the documents that used mendeley and I can't seem to get rid of it. Could you please help me (sorry for the lack of technical language, I am a legal researcher)

dstillman

mendeley is still somehow embedded in the documents that used mendeley

That's not a thing. If they're Mendeley citations, they're Mendeley citations, but they're not going to slow down your computer. It should also be clear whether a problem is in a particular document, because you can just close the document.

We can't provide general computer troubleshooting advice here, but obviously you should restart your computer with no programs running and see what exactly causes the problem to come back. If it happens right from restarting, you likely have malware on your computer.

As for using your Mendeley citations with Zotero, note that Zotero can only relink Mendeley Desktop citations. If you used Mendeley Cite at all, those citations wouldn't work with Zotero.

ezgiuysal96

Dear dstillman,

thank you very much for your quick response.

I now understand that they are mendeley citations when I checked them with fn+alt+f9. They were done with mendeley desktop, not mendeley cite. Unfortunately the issue is with all word documents not just a couple of them. I believe the problem is not about linking the citations as they are already linked.

The problem of crashing down and slowing the laptop started after mendeley stopped supporting footnotes and the problem was gone when I switched to zotero so assumed the problem was with mendeley. However now it came back and I was wondering if the already existing mendeley references were preventing zotero to work properly and causing these problems in word and office 365 in general. If that is the case I will be revising my documents and change these mendeley references to zotero; if not I will be changing my laptop. However I am afraid the same issue with the word documents with mendeley references would cause the problems in the new laptop as well.

I completely understand that any problem caused by mendeley or my laptop does not concern you and it is on me. But I was wondering if you could confirm that zotero does not have any problems working with office 365 and/or with references included with mendeley and later linked to zotero that would cause my laptop to slow down. Because if that is the case I would be switching to a new one.

Best,
Ezgi

adomasven

This is not related to general computer problems, but for what it's worth, we've had users report Word crashing which disappeared after removing the Mendeley plugin from Word completely. While you removed Mendeley, you may need to take additional steps to fully remove the Mendeley plugin from Word. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-manage-and-install-add-ins-for-microsoft-365-programs-16278816-1948-4028-91e5-76dca5380f8d

ezgiuysal96

Dear adomasven,
I took these steps but I could not see mendeley plug-in in the word add-ins, However I did realized that mendeley was still in C in C:\Users\Lenovo\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\AddIns. Now I deleted this too. What else can I do now?

adomasven

All of what dstillman said above still applies and if you continue to have problems I wouldn't rule out this being unrelated to Mendeley/Zotero and a consequence of malware.

ezgiuysal96

Thank you very much for your help, much appreciated!