Corrupted citations and zotero working slowly

Richardcallas

I'm editing a Word doc containing citations entered using zotero. I changed citation styles to Author, Year from numbered citations. After reading about how to cite a author at the beginning of a sentence, I'm editing those entries and selecting "suppress author" so the citation will show as "Smith et al. (2015).

For some reason it takes ~15 seconds to for zotero to update a reference and occasionally the citation looks like this:


ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"MyCbhUOR","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(1994:60)","plainCitation":"(1994:60)"},"citationItems":[{"id":269,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/1621597/items/NNJE8MI8"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/1621597/items/NNJE8MI8"],"itemData":{"id":269,"type":"chapter","title":"Distributional dynamics of modern Martes in North America","container-title":"Martens, sables, and fishers: biology and conservation","publisher":"Cornell University Press","publisher-place":", Ithaca, New York, USA","source":"Google Scholar","event-place":", Ithaca, New York, USA","author":[{"family":"Gibilisco","given":"Charles J."}],"editor":[{"family":"Buskirk","given":"S. W."},{"family":"Harestad","given":"A. S."},{"family":"Raphael","given":"Martin G."},{"family":"Powell","given":"R. A."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["1994"]]}},"locator":"60","suppress-author":true}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"}

I would be grateful for any help regarding how to speed up zotero and how to avoid the ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION text I've gotten when updating a reference. I've read that turing indexing off can increase zotero's speed. Might that help and, if so, how is that done?

Thanks

adamsmith

how large is the document and on what OS are you?
Do you have track changes enabled?

Richardcallas

The document is 7mb and I'm using windows 7 on PC with track changes enabled. Thanks

adamsmith

Unless you have a ton of embedded images, 7mb is a huge document. You'll see delays with Zotero, no way around that currently other than splitting it up into pieces (e.g. chapters).

Track changes may cause the field codes (that's the citation format you're seeing) to become visible occasionally (when something about the changes, I believe). That's not actually corruption, you can just disable that view using alt+F9. I'm not aware of a way around that either.

Richardcallas

Adam,

Thanks very much for your help. I do have a number of figures. I'll remove them from the document while I'm editing and see if that helps.

adamsmith

I don't think figures will make a big difference: it's mostly the number of citations that makes a difference, followed by the length of the document.

Richardcallas

Just in case, I removed the graphics from my document and, at first, I thought it improved Zotero's response speed. The first citation I modified (suppress author feature) took about 4 seconds to correct. However, the second time I tried the same command with a difference citation it took almost 30 seconds to correct.

My document is 150 pages in length and contains about 250 references.

If anyone has any additional suggestions, besides dividing the document into sections and then combining it after editing, I would be grateful.

adamsmith

if you have a bibliography, delete it and insert it only at the end. But unfortunately at this point, once you get over 100 pages of length in a typical document, you are going to see delays.

Richardcallas

Thanks--I've split the document and deleted the bibliography and that really helped. Hopefully, I'll be able to combine the document sections and create a unified bibliography once the my edits are complete. I don't expect that to be a problem. Thanks again for the help.

adamsmith

yeah, that'll just work.

We have some ideas to speed up citations in long documents, but there are a fair number of moving parts involved and it's not going to happen very soon.

Richardcallas

I appreciate all your advice and your suggestion are very workable. I did not realize that deleting the bibliography would speed things up. Good luck with juggling all the moving parts...