Upgrade Storagebibliography long files
This is just a quick post to say thank you to everyone who has provided help on discussions of how to create a bibliography for large files, such as dissertations with multiple chapters. I've benefitted hugely from them when putting together the integrated bibliography for my new book with 12 chapters. So I thought it might be useful to others if I post about what worked for me, all of which are gleaned from various posts in this forum.
1. create a new document and copy your files into it, rather than concatenating existing files. I don't know why, but this seems to help.
2. keep the file size as small as you can. The zotero integration with word for Mac 16 was really struggling, so I took out all the images, and this helped a lot.
3. turn off all apps on your computer other than zotero and word
4. enable logging (under the help menu in zotero), then, before you execute the create bibliography command in word, to go zotero and click on help>debug output logging>view output. Then execute the create bibliography command in word, and, in the zotero window you can see that something is actually happening. If you have a big file it can be frustating just to see the cursor blinking in word. You don't know if anything is actually going on. But if you have output logging on, you can see that something is, even if slowly, so it reassures you that it's worth waiting.
A suggestion for Zotero developers. Might it be possible to put something about this in the help pages for bibliography creation, making clear that it can take time to create them for large files. Or maybe there could be a dialog box, when commands take a while to execute saying something like 'Zotero is working on this, please wait' so people know that the process hasn't been aborted.
Best wishes and thanks,
Claire
1. create a new document and copy your files into it, rather than concatenating existing files. I don't know why, but this seems to help.
2. keep the file size as small as you can. The zotero integration with word for Mac 16 was really struggling, so I took out all the images, and this helped a lot.
3. turn off all apps on your computer other than zotero and word
4. enable logging (under the help menu in zotero), then, before you execute the create bibliography command in word, to go zotero and click on help>debug output logging>view output. Then execute the create bibliography command in word, and, in the zotero window you can see that something is actually happening. If you have a big file it can be frustating just to see the cursor blinking in word. You don't know if anything is actually going on. But if you have output logging on, you can see that something is, even if slowly, so it reassures you that it's worth waiting.
A suggestion for Zotero developers. Might it be possible to put something about this in the help pages for bibliography creation, making clear that it can take time to create them for large files. Or maybe there could be a dialog box, when commands take a while to execute saying something like 'Zotero is working on this, please wait' so people know that the process hasn't been aborted.
Best wishes and thanks,
Claire