Extremesly slow response from the Edit citation feature of the Word plugin for Mac

alessandroc

Dear all,

I am experiencing an extremely slow response trying to edit the wording of the citation using the specific command on the Citation editor feature of the Word plugin for Mac.

In general, once I run the Citation editor function and then click on the Edit citation button placed at the bottom of the UI the text window remains blank (unresponsive) for minutes before I can edit the text.

Now the delay is between 5 and 10 minutes while it was slightly better in the previous weeks.

I am not experiencing any other issue with the Word plugin besides being everything quite slow...


I would than in advance to anyone could provide any support to sort this out.


Best regards,

Alessandro


Software version detail

Zotero v. 5.0.59-beta.1+93bccf8fe

MAC OS version 10.9.5

MS Word for MAC 2011 V. 14.0.0

Thesis length: 500 pages +

djross3

I'm working with a similar document, the same software, and it's about the same speed.

There's a simple solution:
1) turn off automatic updating
2) create a copy of your document (to retain formatting) but delete all contents in this copy; use this new blank document to do all citation editing with Zotero, in small, temporary sections copied/pasted from your main document, then copying/pasting back into the main document -- if kept short, with few citations it will run very quickly (seconds not minutes!), even if your other main document is still open, just in another window
3) rarely, refresh Zotero in the main document after it is all put together-- this step may take maybe one hour to refresh, but you don't need to do it often, maybe even only one time when you're done with the thesis.

The great trick is that you can keep your main document open while copying/pasting to the new document and editing in short sections there, effectively working with the main document the whole time, but just in a much faster secondary window.

alessandroc

Hi,

this is truly a great piece of advice — it works!

It literally took me hours to review a small paragraph...thank you very much,

A.

dstillman

First, you don't want to be editing citations manually if at all possible. It's always better to fix the data in Zotero itself and use the prefix/locator/etc. fields in the plugin to add those details. If you edit citations manually, it prevents Zotero from being able to update them further if you then make further changes in Zotero or if the citation style requires them to change based on context.

You also seem to be referring to the old "classic" citation dialog, with the edit field at the bottom. That edit field is outdated and will be removed in an upcoming version. If you want to edit the text of a citation manually, you can just do that in the document itself. But again, be aware that it will prevent Zotero from updating the citation further (and Zotero will warn you of that).

If you really need to make manual edits, the best time to do it is at the end, in a copy of the document, after unlinking citations and turning them into plain text.

alessandroc

Hi,

first of all thanks for your comment.

Actually I was using the editing citation feature to make changes to the parentheses-enclosed citation — i.e. to turn from (Smith, 1776) to Smith (1776) as in the example reported here: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#quick_format_citation_dialog

So yes, I was aware of the issue but I thought it was the best way to proceed.
To be honest I have probably misunderstood the meaning of the editing feature at the bottom of the plugin: I thought that by editing the citation directly on the text this would have prevented Zotero from listing such citation in the references — the reason why there was a specific editing feature... but your comment suggest that this is not the case...


BTW, I will also consider your advise to make the editing once having turned citations in plain text, so thanks again.

dstillman

That example says to use the Suppress Author checkbox. You can do that from either the default Quick Format interface or from the classic dialog, but either way it doesn't require editing the citation text manually.

dstillman

To be honest I have probably misunderstood the meaning of the editing feature at the bottom of the plugin: I thought that by editing the citation directly on the text this would have prevented Zotero from listing such citation in the references — the reason why there was a specific editing feature... but your comment suggest that this is not the case...

That textbox is only in the classic dialog, and it just dates from before directly editing citations in the document was supported (albeit still discouraged). When we added the Quick Format interface, we added support for direct editing, which is why there's no similar textbox in the Quick Format interface.

Editing citation text manually won't prevent the citation from showing up in the bibliography — it'll just prevent Zotero from being able to automatically update it as necessary.