zotero for mac incredibly slow D520286836

Nele_Poll

hey there,
I am working on a 90000 word document with 500 different titles on a macbook air and it is incredibly slow. Changing a single citation takes at least 2 minutes often longer. Refreshing the whole thing takes hours. I've made a debug log with the id D520286836. Any ideas? Many thanks!

adomasven

Unfortunately Zotero integration with Mac Word got very slow since Word 16.9. There is little we can do, bar rewriting the whole plugin using an updated Word API and even then it's not clear whether that would improve the performance. If you haven't disabled automatic citation updates under Zotero Document Preferences, that would be something to do to potentially speed it up. The performance on Windows Word is also better, if you have a Windows computer available.

Nele_Poll

Thanks for the quick reply! Is there any reasonable hope of this improving in the near future? I don't have a windows computer and if it stays this slow it might be cheaper to look for a different reference manager rather than a new computer. (though that would break my heart...)

adomasven

There are no plans for this in the near future.

bwiernik

With documents this long, I recommend you splitting the document into smaller chapters in any event. Word itself gets rather unstable at that length.

dstillman

@Nele_Poll: Do you have automatic citation updates disabled, though? The idea here is that in larger documents, you turn that off while you're writing, which should make individual inserts almost instantaneous. (Splitting the document up into chapters, as bwiernik suggests, is also a good idea.) Then at the end, before you submit the paper, you combine everything into one document and press Refresh and let it run — which unfortunately can take several hours in a very large document — and it updates all the citations and generates the bibliography.