Programme crashes when citing

Julianaaa

I am writing a paper. At some point, "Word" closed every time I wanted to insert or edit a citation. Each time a Zotero window opened with the following text: "An error occurred while updating your document. Would you like to view the troubleshooting guide?" I could select "yes" or "no". I tried every step of the guide, but nothing worked. When I thought I had isolated the faulty source, the citation still worked. I changed the citation style, copied the document, copied the content into a new document, etc., all to no avail.
I already suspected that my document was too large (about 40 pages) for Zotero to work well. But in the search for the incorrect citation, a one-page document also crashed when I tried to insert a citation. I really don't know what the problem is. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

adamsmith

Sorry,.it's unclear what's actually happening: is Word crashing, i.e. shutting down unexpectedly, or are you just receiving an error message from the Zotero add-on?

Julianaaa

Thank you for your answer.
Word is crashing and I'm receiving an error message from the Zotero add-on. Zotero itself isn't shutting down.

dstillman

@Julianaaa: Did you manage to resolve this, or are you still having trouble?

Julianaaa

I didn't manage to resolve it. So I created the sources in a different, problem-free Word document and inserted them into the promlematic Word document using ‘Merge formatting’; this way Word recognises the citation as such. For the bibliography, I loaded the library onto a USB stick and had the bibliography done on another laptop. It is interesting to note that I continued to have problems editing the sources on my own laptop, but was finally able to update the bibliography without Word crashing.
I hope this helps you.