zotero very slow when adding citation in word, D545831883

sabineklein
Hi there,
zotero has been my companion for my dissertation during the last months. It ran fine for a while, but recently became very very slow. Adding one citation in a footnote takes usually 60 - 90 seconds. That's too slow. If I can't solve the issue, I'd unfortunately be forced to look for an another solution. But as I did not give up hope yet, I thought maybe someone here may be able to help. I'd be grateful!

Here some corner data:
I am using a Macbook pro, late 2008, with 2,4Ghz Core2Duo, 4GB Ram, 512 GB drive, OS X 10.9.2 (latest update). All in all the machine is not the fastest one, but works for everything else than Zotero satisfactorily.
Am running Zotero standalone 4.0.20 and Microsoft Word 2011 (Version 14.1.0).
The zotero library is not too big -424 entries-, roughly one third of them added with a pdf-file. The current word-document is quite complex: 390 pages, over 1000 footnotes, and estimated 700 zotero-entries in the footnotes. Other citations were added by hand as I did not find a matching zotero style.

What I've unsuccessfully tried to solve the issue already:
- disabling 'sync automatically'
- cleaning the index and reduced maximum index size to zero
- restarted computer, word, zotero repeatedly

A debug log just created while adding a citation is:
D545831883

I'd be grateful for any thought!!
Bine
  • adamsmith
    unfortunately I don't think this will speed up. Long documents with lots of Zotero citations in Word for Mac are just slow. The size of your Zotero library is mostly irrelevant. Best recommendation I can give you is to split the document up while editing and reassemble as a final step.
  • grbr
    Hi, just a thought: I believe Zotero refreshes all citations when inserting a new reference, or at least does something longer when there are more citations. I've tried a simple workaround that worked on a 200+ page dissertation with hundreds of references: open an empty Word file, insert your reference there, then cut & paste it into the large document.
    Dunno if it'll work for you folks using footnotes, but it does for (Author, Date) style references :)
  • degraves
    I also have had difficulty with large files and tried the copy and paste from a small document and the footnotes works great. Everything updates fine in the footnotes and the bibliography. Great workaround for my books which typically are over 200 pages. Now if Zotero could create a similar feature for inserting footnotes without indexing the entire datebase that would be great for large projects.
  • z8080
    I agree. My dissertation document is also a nightmare to insert extra citations into, and this is now already a big problem, as breaking it down into small documents is just not something I want to do at this stage. Hopefully the infamous 10-second lower bound for isnerting citations will somehow be fixed (perhaps by recoding some code that has reached critical mass), otherwise for my next large document I will sadly have to consider switching to another refman software, which I would really not want to do, especially after evangelising Zotero to all my friends and colleagues :-D
  • joosthi
    I am using Zotero in Word on Windows10 and Chrome and it is great, I recommend it to all my students. However, I am working on a book and since it has crossreferences and such I want to work in one document and it is now at 75 pages and 27 000 words and adding citations is starting to go slower and slower because he wants to update the whole document. Since I will double the size of the document before I finish, I start to worry should it slow even more. It is already interupting my work flow.
    Now the question : is there a way to disable this automatic whole document update? I wouldn't mind having to do that manually every now and then, than at least I can keep my flow. I treid to find it in these discussions but to no avail.
    Many thanks for a great product neverthelesss.
    Joost
  • adamsmith
    Now the question : is there a way to disable this automatic whole document update?
    no, sorry. Only thing I can recommend is to not author in a single 100+ pages document (e.g. write large theses/manuscripts in separate chapter files).
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited February 10, 2016
    Please correct me if my memory is wrong. If this didn't work as I seem to recall, please let me know.

    When I wrote my (300+ pages , 400+ references) doctoral thesis, I split it up into many smaller sections and later I merged (copy/paste) the sections and only then did I refresh and insert the bibliography. References to the same item in subsequent sections automatically recognized the earlier cites and didn't duplicate the reference list entries.

    At first I was uncomfortable with the idea of chopping my thesis into shorter bits but when actually doing the writing, I found that (even not considering the insert cite speed) I liked the process more. I found that having several shorter documents allowed me to efficiently move blocks of text around, section-to-section, as needed.
  • francois.delerue
    It would be great if in the next release of the word processor it could be included the possibility to disable the automatic refreshing of the footnotes. It could be disabled for the time we are working on the document and be reactivated each time we close/reopen the document.

    I have the same problem, I am writing a PhD in law, with a lot of footnotes. I split my work in several documents, but even doing so each chapter is about 50 pages with 300 footnotes and each time I modify one it takes several minutes for zotero to work out the refreshment.
  • DWL-SDCA
    You can consider deleting the bibliography and only creating it now-and-then. After verifying that everything is bibliographically correct you can delete it again. If you save-as; you will have incremental backups and you can start the next iteration without the bibliography you always have a version with a bibliography. With long documents I find that _not_ having a dynamic bibliography can greatly speed up writing. When doing your backups ==do not== remove the field codes.
  • MohsenIT
    According to my experiences when merging 2 documents, if you format using "Bookmarks", Zotero not identify the citations of 2nd documents.
    So, you should set format to "Fields".
Sign In or Register to comment.