Is this in a new document, too, or only in a specific document? If it's only in a longer document, try deleting the bibliography if you've already inserted one. Also what type of citation style are you using? Probably author-date styles will allow you to work fastest.

PS The Word file is about 3.2MB in size.

fbennett - yeah - he did this already.
I fear you're just at a limit of document size that works well with Zotero/Word - I'd recommend splitting in up while you're doing actual writing and editing and re-assembling this at the end. The problem may very well be only partly Zotero's and partly simply due to things that Word does, but I see that that doesn't help you much. All people I know who work on large manuscripts work with chapters in separate files until the last moment.

Hi guys, I have the same problem, even though my .doc is only 83 pages and just 332 Kb (no bibliography).

Does Zotero work without problems with split-up word docs? I mean will it handle the references correctly when merging the document parts etc.? Any experiences?

thanks mark, that eases my worries ;-)

I did some research in the meantime. at least Office 2010/2011 has a very comfortable function to manage such documents. it should translate into some like "central document" and "affiliate document" (German link how it works with some screenshots, maybe it is understandable if you don't speak German: http://www.computerwoche.de/software/office-collaboration/2364637/index3.html). By doing so, Word splits your master document into separate files, which you can edit without having the big document open. And it merges them automatically, if requested. Seems to work with Zotero references as well.

Small disadvantage: cross references from one separate file into another seem not to work, but maybe I can find a bug fix...

My master document experience was painful enough that I don't want to try it again. Stick with well-tested features like basic files and Insert File.

No experience with standalone yet. In any case, I found that inserting citations in chapters-as-separate-documents was not so slow at all. It is when you merge everything and include the bibliography that Zotero takes a lot of time checking and regenerating everything.

Mark - right, with separate chapters the speed-problem is solved. However, the problem with the cross-references remains, as I didn't find any way to define cross-references between doc.s

I tried Zotero SA now, but its not really faster. I think root-cause of the degreasing speed is what you write - Zotero seems to check a lot of stuff each time I insert a new citation.
If there would be a way to NOT recheck everything when I insert a citation, but only manually or when I build the bibliography, that would help a lot.

Library size is not directly related. My library is approx 6000 main items (not counting attachments) and in small documents the word plugin is lightning fast. It's really the large documents with many citations that are a problem. I recognise delays of 40s-60s; it is very annoying indeed. I do hope a faster way can be found.

Perhaps the solution is a "quick add/edit" mode. In this mode, adding or edting a ref would just add or modify the field but do nothing to check author disambiguation, bibliography ordering, and all the other things that now take up to one minute. At least in author-date styles it is not strictly necessary to do all the checking until the user wants the checking done. The "refresh bibliography" would then take care of the checking etc. whenever the user is ready to get a coffee (or a tea).

I hope I'm putting this in the right place: I recently began having issues with long delays whenever I insert a footnote. I'm using Word for Mac. The experience is also very much like what is described in this closed thread:

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12078/inserting-citation-into-a-word-document-causes-alot-of-repagination/

Unfortunately I can't tell you when exactly this started happening, because I was not writing much during the past year, but I have the latest version of 2.0.

Zotero seems to be reformatting all of my footnotes every single time I insert a new one. Word puts on a show of being very busy: the screen flickers like crazy, and if I try to move the cursor, it is immediately returned to where it started. I tried using smaller files, but it doesn't matter if the document is 10 pages, or 60. It slows my writing down to a crawl, but the most unfortunate part about it is that Word's Undo function is pretty much killed. Zotero's note edits seem to require dozens of tiny steps, and it takes ages to cycle back through all of them to get to my own, last change--this frustrating behavior is one of the main reasons I stop using Endnote X2 in favor of Zotero, so I'm sad to see it cropping up now. Thanks for any help or advice, but please don't ask me not to use Chicago--with the kind of work I do, using APA would slow me down even more, as I would need to constantly look up bibliographic information in the full database. I'd really like Chicago to work like it's supposed to.