Suggestions for handling a very large project?
I am trying to create the bibliography for my combined dissertation. So far, I have handled the very large number of references and citations by working on the document in separate pieces. However, I have to provide a single bibliography for the complete dissertation, so I put everything in a single file this afternoon. However, there are evidently so many references/citations that Zotero simply cannot handle the combined document. I have tried repeatedly to get it to work, but I cannot even get the "Document Preferences" dialogue box to open, much less accomplish anything or add a full bibliography. I sat and waited for over half an hour for the dialogue box to open and nothing happened. Are there any options for me at this point so that I can finish my dissertation without having to start over with some other piece of software? Thank you in advance for your suggestions and help.
It's certainly true that Zotero goes painfully slow in large documents, but a typical book length document really shouldn't be a problem to at least generate a bibliography. Also, the Set Document Preferences window, afaik, doesn't even load up all citation information, so I don't see why that would not come up.
How exactly are you assembling this? Are you pasting into an empty document or are you pasting Chapter 2, 3, 4, into the Chapter 1 file?
If you're doing the former, try selecting a citation style _before_ you paste anything into the document, see if that helps.
If it doesn't, what if you go bit by bit, i.e. start with Chapter 1 and 2, see if that works, then do 1,2,3, etc. This will a) make sure the general merge process works and b) let you test at what stage this actually fails.