Bulk item operations(import and deletion etc.) are slow, any suggestions?

Guest3713

Hello dear fellows in the forum, I have started recently a literature review work and have to deal with bulk items of journal articles. However, I find it really slow to import a .ris file containing more than 5000 records, and sometimes it just stucks and exits. Also, once the import operation terminates unsuccessfully, reopening and deletion of the file folder is also frustratingly slow, not to say emptying the bin afterwards. I wonder if it was my fault to manipulate that bulk at a time and maintaining an large archive without discreet management , but I would still like to seek if any better mode exists to cope with this current issue? Any suggestions would be of great help!

Guest3713

I have turned off a few of addons (better notes, zotero style, zotcard etc.) in sequence and found out that although success rates would improve, it crashed a few times still. Just for supplementary material.

dstillman

If this is Windows, you should try with the 64-bit version of the Zotero 7 beta. Zotero 6 is limited in the amount of memory it can use on Windows, which can be a problem for large imports.

Guest3713

Many thanks! Many of my friends did recommend to me the new version, phraising its rapid response and new features like explicit text insertion and many others. However, allowing for the possible instability, I would like to make the shift following the release of a stable version.

Guest3713

By the way, I wonder if the Mac version and the Windows version have inherent disparities which result in different response speed of the same version? In other words, does the software run faster on either platform naturally?

adamsmith

Not really, no, with two exceptions: The Zotero 6 version is 32-bit on Windows, which as dstillman says above, limits memory available to the application, and Zotero's integration with Word for Mac is much slower than that with Word for Windows (they're identical for GDocs and LibreOffice).

Guest3713

I see. Many Thanks! It is really hard to find a trully desirable software for literature archiving and knowledge management nowdays, and Zotero is ranked the first place currently in my PC considering the advantage it offers in knowledge management with numerous add-ons. However, task performance in relation to bulk import and categorization and recategorization is a realisitc concern in daily usage with the accumulating item numbers and surging needs for general browsing within a specific period. I wish that during the iterative optimization this software could be more and more convient to facilitate research process!