My Zotero is very slow. Please help.

siv210

When I try to include a new citation in a footnote of a Word document, it takes more than 10 seconds.

Please, let me know how can I solve the problem. My Debug ID is: D163706926

Best,

Sergio

bwiernik

How long is your document? And what version of Word are you using (e.g., Word for Mac 2016 version 16.9.4).

siv210

The document has around 11,000 words (including footnotes), and 124 footnotes. Most footnotes have citations that use Zotero.

I am using Word 2016, for Microsoft.

bwiernik

With that many citations (particularly in footnotes), Zotero will start to slow down. The beta version of Zotero has many changes to the Word integration that dramatically increase the speed. You can try upgrading to the beta. You could also insert the citations into an empty Word document and then cut and paste them into your main file.
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev_builds

siv210

If what you say is correct, and if the beta version doesn't work well, then Zotero is not the right software for legal scholars like me. Most of my articles are even are longer. I am planning to write an academic book. It is a pity that Zotero won't be helpful

I am glad to know this problem before renovating my subscription (which will depend on whether the beta version is useful). I wish I had known about this problem before investing so much time in uploading my materials to Zotero.

bwiernik

The beta works well. I recommend you update to it. Regarding writing a book, Word itself doesn't handle that many footnotes very well. I strongly recommend that you write the book with each chapter as its own document, then combine at the end (whether you use Zotero or not).

siv210

I will try it. Thanks for your help.

Gurdas_Sandhu

@bwiernik 11K words and 124 footnotes don't sound big at all. I wonder how many total citations? I also wonder if this is something specific to footnotes.

@siv210 When you combine chapters after finishing each one individually, you can still have a single bibliography at the end of the book, if you prefer that.

siv210

Thanks, Gurdas.

Most footnotes have one citation, but some of them have two or three. Perhaps the total number of citations is close to 150.

adamsmith

Yeah, I agree -- 11k words is just a regular academic article and Zotero shouldn't slow down on that at all.
It does slow down on book-length manuscripts, but there we're talking 70-90k words and >1000 citations (and the recommendation to author in chapters is certainly true there).

I'd indeed try the beta -- the issues here sound more like the general speed issues that have been occurring since Zotero signed to Word add-on. It's certainly not normal or expected.

dstillman

the general speed issues that have been occurring since Zotero signed to Word add-on

(I'm pretty sure it's not due to signing, but we're still trying to figure out what the issue is. As far as we can tell it's extremely variable for the people who've reported these slowdowns.)

fbennett

@siv210 I wouldn't give up on Zotero. I run a variant of Zotero that is used by legal scholars. That's not a pitch -- you should stick with what you have if it's serving your needs. But I recently released a version that adopts the beta features, and it's been very well received by users with large projects going. You can expect further improvements in this and other areas of Zotero development.

Stinus

@siv210: In my experience the new beta largely solves speed problems related to updating citations since you can delay updating.
Footnotes are tricky though, also for MS Word itself. Apart from chunking up the chapters, you can try working with a lighter citation style while writing (something with just author-date) and then converting to footnotes only in the last edit.