Zotero is not working anymore - Word for Mac 16.11.1 (180319) and Zotero 5.0.43

TJtom

Hi,

I've been using Zotero for the last year to write my dissertation thesis.

I use Word for Mac 16.11.1 (180319) and Zotero 5.0.43.

Since two days ago, I can't edit and insert citations anymore. When I click "edit/insert citation" everything works as usual, I can even choose the literature and add notes etc. When I'm finished with chooing the literature and click "ok", it switches back to Word (as usual), but then it says "{citation}" in the footnote for about hours and the actual citation won't be changed. When I then close Word, it says "The operation couldn't be completed. (OSStatus error -1708.) @ [selectField:field.m:]".

Hope you guys can help me with that...
Cheers!

adomasven

Run through the debugging broken documents steps.

TJtom

Thx for your answer.
It is working when I copy the text in a new doc (however, the new doc has 224 pages and the original one 222?!).
But when I try to insert/edit a citation in the original doc, it switches to the desktop, but the Zotero "choose your literature"-window does not appear anymore...

adomasven

Restart Zotero

TJtom

Edit: When I edit or insert a new citation in the new doc, the citation has a broken line under it... What does that mean and how do I get rid of it? Thx again!

adomasven

See https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-5-0-36/#faster-citing-in-large-documents

TJtom

You are so helpful, thank you very much!

If I enable "automatically update citations", even the new doc takes hours to insert/edit a citation (actually about 8 mins so far) and nothing happens.
So it's basically the same issue as in the original doc.
(And I can't disable "automatically update citations" in the original doc. When I click "Document preferences" it switches to the desktop, but Zotero does not appear.)

Might it be that Zotero is not "not working" anymore, but it just takes 20min to update all the citations (1022 so far). But when I "just" had 950, it worked within 10 sec.

TJtom

Sry, I'm just driving crazy right now as I've been writing my thesis for about 2 years now and I wanted to hand it in this week and now I'm getting these issues...

adomasven

You will either get a slow first insert after restarting Zotero (could take well over 20 minutes with a document this big), but subsequent citations will be pretty fast. This is unavoidable, because Zotero has to load all citations that you entered into the document into its memory.

Otherwise you can disable automatic citation updates and cite normally, but Zotero will insert citations with underlines. Once you have finished your manuscript click "Refresh" in the Zotero tab and Zotero will update all the underlined citations to their final versions.

TJtom

I disabled automatic citation updates and cited normally in my new doc. Now I'm finished, so I clicked "refresh". I waited for 1 hour, but nothing happened. The citations are still underlined. :(

dstillman

If you go to Help → Debug Output Logging → View Output, do you see activity while it's refreshing?

TJtom

Yes, there is a lot of activity.

Turned out that it finally worked after letting it do its job for about 2 hours...
Now it‘s the same with the bibliography. 30min are gone yet

adomasven

@TJTom Could you install the Zotero Beta and see if that works faster for you?

TJtom

Haha not sure if I wanna take the risk. I'm kind of screwed if it breaks down completely...

bwiernik

There's not really any risk. You can always re-install the current version of Zotero. If you are concerned, make a copy of the file first before testing.