Zotero will not create new citations/references

thompsonmarie

A patron has a document in which she has created several citations but now when she tried to create a new one, it does not work. When in WORD she clicks on Add/Edit citation, Zotero shows the place where the citation will go: {Citation} but when she selects the article reference from the collection, it does not create a citation. It just stays as {citation}. We have reloaded Zotero; checked the WORD plug-in; and the Automatically update citations is checked in the Document Preferences tab. I'm stumped - what to do?

adamsmith

Which operating system, how large is the document and how long has she waited? {Citation} is the placholder that appears until the final citation is inserted, which can take a bit (especially with automatically update checked)

thompsonmarie

Thank you Adam,
My patron is running Window on a PC. We met over ZOOM and shared screen. I watched her try to create a new citation. We did not wait very long to see if it created the citation. She is working on a thesis that is growing in length. The CWYW has worked in the past but perhaps she has reached a point where the document is too long for rapid citation creation.

adamsmith

Yeah, so the recommendation would be to turn *off* "Automatically update citations" and it should be pretty quick on Windows, even in a fairly large document.
For dissertation-length work, the recommendation (for Zotero specifically but also in general) remains to author in individual chapters and put those together at the end.