What style are you using? Numeric styles can cause cascading changes throughout the document as the numbering is updated, which can take a long time. If you are using a numeric style, switch to an author-date on (for now), and switch back when you need to submit the manuscript. Switching between the two is safe.

Also, delete the bibliography from the end of your document-- Zotero has to update it each time you modify or add a citation, so you can save processing time by waiting to insert it until you actually are ready to submit the manuscript.

Your description seems clear, but just in case: Does the delay occur when you request an entirely new citation, or only when inserting a reference into an existing citation? (If the latter, do you keep the "Show Editor" window open on your citations during editing?)

(If the delay is occurring on entirely new citations, we can at least be sure that the citation processor is not causing the delay.)

Hello,
The delay occurs when I insert any new citation, not when inserting a reference into an existing citation.
The first citation takes about 5 minutes, but even 2nd and 3rd citations take over 3 minutes.

I have heard that the biggest latency is in pulling citations out of the document, and that Word is slower at this task than Open Office. I believe that Zotero currently touches every citation when there is an update (and the processor expects to receive a list of all citationIDs, in order to identify citations that should change in response to edits in the current citation, and intervening deletions elsewhere). This may be where the better part of this delay is coming from (although the length of the delay does hold out some hope that this might be due to a slow loop somewhere that can be sped up).

It's a judgement call for the core devs, but it might be possible to implement an optional "fast insert mode" for large documents, that requires only input data for the immediate citation being edited, and does not attempt to preserve correctness throughout the document by updating surrounding citations on the fly (the idea being that the document would periodically be updated manually with "Refresh" to touch up formatting). If a move is made in that direction, the citation processor (which I maintain) can certainly be adapted to the task without much trouble.

Can you provide a debug ID? This will let us know whether there is a problem in Zotero, or this is just Word being slow, in which case there's not much we could do about it.

thielto: are you using the Quick Format dialog or the classic add citation dialog? Does this depend on whether it's the first citation you add to a document or not?

As far as it seems to me, transferring a bibliographical entry into a word footnote from a database is not a particularly performance intensive operation, or am I wrong?

Zotero has to read the all of the references out of the document and determine how inserting a new reference will affect existing references. Usually, on a Mac, the bottleneck is Word, which returns the references very slowly. Word for Mac takes longer to return each individual reference as the document grows, and longer documents also have more fields. Word for Windows is faster at returning fields to begin with, and doesn't seem to get slower at returning individual fields as the number of fields grows.

I am experiencing a similar problem and have started a discussion: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22622/inserting-citations-is-very-slow/

I have tried most or all of the solutions posted in discussions concerning Zotero being slow, and have not had any positive results.

define "painfully slow" - are you seeing the 5-10 secs described by thielto or the 5mins by the OP?