Just tested Mendeley 1.12.3 dev 1 and it was either extremely slow or not even working properly. Can be because I used it on my zotero-made ODF file (which it did seem to recognise in principle though).
Hi megabert, note that the recent optimisations to the Mendeley Plugin affect Microsoft Word for Mac and Windows only, Open Office and its forks were hardly improved at all. Word performance was improved significantly, especially for incremental updates (e.g. inserting/removing/editing citations).
Im really desperate and frustrated with Zotero recently since it has become so painfully slow. It takes a minute or so to be able to search for the right citation, search itself is rather fast, then to insert the citation again takes ages. It really disturbs my workflow.
The word document has around 130 pages now. It should have around 300 when I'm done. So the problem will get worse probably.
I use Zotero Standalone and Word for Windows 2013 (latest version).
I submitted a DebugID (D1763696038).
Are there instructions on how to move to Mendeley and transform the document? do i have to update every single citation?
whole thing in one file: because i want to do it like that. i don't work serially but rather parallel, doing edits in several different chapters etc. also: i'd like to have an overview on how things are developing with the document as a whole, doing a lot of cross-references etc. i think a reference management software should be able to manage references, quickly, even in very long document. it's one of the key functions. telling users to split their documents into small bits to make it work, is like selling a car (okay, your not selling anything, i'll give you that) and telling the buyer: to get from a to b you have to change the car every 100 miles.
yeah, frankly, you're not going to be happy with Zotero then. It will slow down in a 100 page document, it will definitely be slow in a 300 page document.
You can see how much faster Mendeley is -- I'd be surprised if they're able to handle large documents that much better, but who knows.
A lot of the speed issues here are related to Word (how fast it collects and passes on field information).
@dknol: Do you have a bibliography set in your document? If so, you might try deleting it for the present, to see if that has an impact on performance.
You're welcome to move to Mendeley, of course, and we would be interested to hear about the relative performance of their new plugin architecture if you do; but I'm also curious whether updates to the bibliography might be a factor here.
deleting the bibliography did only have a minimal effect. i tried the workaround mentioned here: open another empty document, insert citation there, then copy and paste back. however, i do not know how this will affect citations in the main document with the same author and year, which will normally be distinguished by an additional letter after the year (2014a, 2014b etc.). can someone help me out with this?
also, i tried the latest developer-version of mendeley. _way_ faster than zotero. especially the insertation dialogue shows up immediately, whereas zotero takes a minute until i can search. the formatting procedure that follows the insertion takes still some time with menedely. it's still faster, more transparent (shows progress in %) and the document stays accessable. will do more comparisons tomorrow. now it looks like i'll switch to mendeley.
Thanks for reporting back. The two systems use the same citation formatter (citeproc-js, written by me), so the time for formatting per se should be about the same. It sounds, though, as though Zotero may be blocking the UI during some operations that Mendeley is performing asynchronously. (It doesn't help your situation in the short term, but I believe that will change in Zotero with the next major release.)
To answer your question, citations pasted in from another document should reconcile correctly (with 2014a, 2014b etc) when the citations are refreshed.
If you have a lot of citations that require disambiguation, that will also affect processor performance. You can get around it in the drafting stage (on both platforms) by using a style that doesn't perform disambiguation. I think the fastest configuration with word processor plugins would be a numeric style without a bibliography set, followed by an author-date style with disambiguation disabled (also without bibliography).
dknol: that debug ID is copy/pasted from nmarantz above and is from Word for Mac, not Word for Windows. If you need help generating a debug ID, follow these instructions.
I misspoke (or mis-wrote) above: the best alternative to a pure numeric style would be a purely static footnote style (i.e. one that does neither disambiguation nor back-referencing). One of those will provide enough information for you to identify each resource, but keep the details out of the text to avoid distraction.
Here is the most suitable static note style in the repository. To try it out, just install it to Zotero (or Standalone) from http://zotero.org/styles, and then switch the document to it.
(I've edited the list to remove five styles that, on closer inspection, do positional back-referencing.)
(Actually, only one of the styles in the initial list fits the bill - the others were either in-text [author-date] styles, were cast in other languages, or provided only a code string in the citation. If you give this a try, use "History and Theory" for testing.)
i tried the particular style you mentioned. it seems to speed things up at least a little. however, all the footnote-styles get confusing when you want to cite something within a preexisting-footnote that you used before for additional comment, since there is no clear delimination of a citation within a footnote (for example, by "()").
i will also try citavi today that my university provides for free.
Good to hear that it had at least some effect. A document that large is going to be a speed challenge on any system, since as adamsmith notes, the largest latency is in simply pulling data out of the document.
Mendeley may turn out to be faster, but caution may be in order; if the Zotero citations were not fully imported as dynamic references, you might see a speed hit when the references are transferred to the other system. I'm kind of talking out of my hat there, since I don't know the details, but it's a good idea to draw conclusions carefully.
In any case, the most important thing is to get a drafting environment in place that works well and fits your style.
not necessary at this time since i switched to citavi (yeah, had to re-insert every individual reference) and it appears to show no performance loss with the full document, bibliography and all citations. speedwise its a day-and-night-difference compared to zotero. thanks for the help anyways!
If I could ask, does the Citavi word processor support work as illustrated in this screencast? (If so, that would explain the speed difference: it's using static markers.)
no, in my case (and i think that's the current status in the latest version of the software / word add-in), it uses non-static markers. and it's still way faster.
I would also like to give my HUGE thanks to the team - Zotero has performed brilliantly as I work on my 268 page,757 reference, 17 Meg thesis. My only issue is the speed of adding a new reference, editing an existing reference or updating the reference list. I suspect these all involve some of the same background work, but they take just marginally short of forever - last refresh run was at least 15 min (I went out for a walk!), so I only refresh at the end of the day or when I have a break.
I did all my writing development in separate chapters, so only merged them into a huge document as late as possible.
I now want to keep all the text in one document as it allows me to make live cross references, correct duplications and easily move material around.
My solution - create the reference in another document and copy just the reference across. The next time I refresh my main document it adds the a, b, c etc as required. This is not perfect, but it works and allows me to keep my huge document.
So thanks to all the team - no complaint, just a comment
Finishing my phd (similar specs as yours) really forced me to engage with Zotero deeper in the past few weeks, I spent much time in the forums here and the outcome is two things, 1) I love Zotero and the extremely helpful community behind it, I test-drove Mendeley and Endnote and would not want to change but 2) speed IS an issue, a big one, and the answer is not the often cited reply “just draft in separate chapters”.
And you point out really well why that is - cross referencing and the like - looking back I should have merged my chapters much earlier..
Anyway - I’m not a programmer and everyone envolved in coding here is automatically my hero. But if anyone could do anything about the speed, that would be just so so great.
Hi there,
I am in a somewhat similar situation. I am finishing my PhD in history (in German). A 350 page LibreOffice document (LibreOffice 4.3.5.2). Quotations are German style, in footnotes (more than 1000 of them). I am using a Zotero database with approx 600 entries. I am now in the final stages and need all cross-referencing etc. options, which is why I have compiled the chapters into one document. I clicked on "refresh" in the LibreOffice Zotero Bar in order to update all references. This has worked in the past for smaller docs, but now it doesn't. I have waited about 25 min. Nothing happens. Do I have to wait even longer? Please help, if possible -- this is quite a critical moment as I have to submit in 2 weeks.
I have tried to produce a debug record, after about 5 minutes of waiting (the number of lines keeps growing constantly, and I stopped after 14000 lines or so). ID is 1410695622. Thank you very much for your help!
Sorry for digging up this thread but I'm also experiencing issues with the performance. Not only does inserting or changing citations take ages, no, sometimes even Word starts to slow down so much that only one letter after the other pops up and I have to wait some time until the whole sentenced is filled in. I therefore stopped working with track change - I started to do this to see at what time I wrote something - but didn't help yet.
I submitted my log under the following debug id. It isn't the worst example I could provide (only took 10-20 seconds until the dialog disappear) but bad though (I don't want to log all the time). When the performance gets worse again I'll submit another log. (I might add that sometimes - after changing a cite - Zotero starts to go through all altered cites [where I killed a full stop or likewise manually] and asks me if I want to keep the changes... that's annoying).
(I might add that sometimes - after changing a cite - Zotero starts to go through all altered cites [where I killed a full stop or likewise manually] and asks me if I want to keep the changes... that's annoying).
It has done that more than once for the same citation?
Upgrade Storage
The word document has around 130 pages now. It should have around 300 when I'm done. So the problem will get worse probably.
I use Zotero Standalone and Word for Windows 2013 (latest version).
I submitted a DebugID (D1763696038).
Are there instructions on how to move to Mendeley and transform the document? do i have to update every single citation?
thanks for the help guys.
Certainly you shouldn't be seeing minute-long lags in a hundred page document but still, any reason you're authoring the whole thing in one file?
Which citation style?
style: chicago, author-date.
ps. sorry for the rant. still frustrated.
You can see how much faster Mendeley is -- I'd be surprised if they're able to handle large documents that much better, but who knows.
A lot of the speed issues here are related to Word (how fast it collects and passes on field information).
You're welcome to move to Mendeley, of course, and we would be interested to hear about the relative performance of their new plugin architecture if you do; but I'm also curious whether updates to the bibliography might be a factor here.
also, i tried the latest developer-version of mendeley. _way_ faster than zotero. especially the insertation dialogue shows up immediately, whereas zotero takes a minute until i can search. the formatting procedure that follows the insertion takes still some time with menedely. it's still faster, more transparent (shows progress in %) and the document stays accessable. will do more comparisons tomorrow. now it looks like i'll switch to mendeley.
To answer your question, citations pasted in from another document should reconcile correctly (with 2014a, 2014b etc) when the citations are refreshed.
If you have a lot of citations that require disambiguation, that will also affect processor performance. You can get around it in the drafting stage (on both platforms) by using a style that doesn't perform disambiguation. I think the fastest configuration with word processor plugins would be a numeric style without a bibliography set, followed by an author-date style with disambiguation disabled (also without bibliography).
Here is the most suitable static note style in the repository. To try it out, just install it to Zotero (or Standalone) from http://zotero.org/styles, and then switch the document to it.
History and Theory (history-and-theory.csl)
(Edited - see note below)
(Actually, only one of the styles in the initial list fits the bill - the others were either in-text [author-date] styles, were cast in other languages, or provided only a code string in the citation. If you give this a try, use "History and Theory" for testing.)
i tried the particular style you mentioned. it seems to speed things up at least a little. however, all the footnote-styles get confusing when you want to cite something within a preexisting-footnote that you used before for additional comment, since there is no clear delimination of a citation within a footnote (for example, by "()").
i will also try citavi today that my university provides for free.
Mendeley may turn out to be faster, but caution may be in order; if the Zotero citations were not fully imported as dynamic references, you might see a speed hit when the references are transferred to the other system. I'm kind of talking out of my hat there, since I don't know the details, but it's a good idea to draw conclusions carefully.
In any case, the most important thing is to get a drafting environment in place that works well and fits your style.
I did all my writing development in separate chapters, so only merged them into a huge document as late as possible.
I now want to keep all the text in one document as it allows me to make live cross references, correct duplications and easily move material around.
My solution - create the reference in another document and copy just the reference across. The next time I refresh my main document it adds the a, b, c etc as required. This is not perfect, but it works and allows me to keep my huge document.
So thanks to all the team - no complaint, just a comment
Finishing my phd (similar specs as yours) really forced me to engage with Zotero deeper in the past few weeks, I spent much time in the forums here and the outcome is two things, 1) I love Zotero and the extremely helpful community behind it, I test-drove Mendeley and Endnote and would not want to change but 2) speed IS an issue, a big one, and the answer is not the often cited reply “just draft in separate chapters”.
And you point out really well why that is - cross referencing and the like - looking back I should have merged my chapters much earlier..
Anyway - I’m not a programmer and everyone envolved in coding here is automatically my hero. But if anyone could do anything about the speed, that would be just so so great.
I am in a somewhat similar situation. I am finishing my PhD in history (in German). A 350 page LibreOffice document (LibreOffice 4.3.5.2). Quotations are German style, in footnotes (more than 1000 of them). I am using a Zotero database with approx 600 entries. I am now in the final stages and need all cross-referencing etc. options, which is why I have compiled the chapters into one document. I clicked on "refresh" in the LibreOffice Zotero Bar in order to update all references. This has worked in the past for smaller docs, but now it doesn't. I have waited about 25 min. Nothing happens. Do I have to wait even longer? Please help, if possible -- this is quite a critical moment as I have to submit in 2 weeks.
I have tried to produce a debug record, after about 5 minutes of waiting (the number of lines keeps growing constantly, and I stopped after 14000 lines or so). ID is 1410695622. Thank you very much for your help!
I submitted my log under the following debug id. It isn't the worst example I could provide (only took 10-20 seconds until the dialog disappear) but bad though (I don't want to log all the time). When the performance gets worse again I'll submit another log. (I might add that sometimes - after changing a cite - Zotero starts to go through all altered cites [where I killed a full stop or likewise manually] and asks me if I want to keep the changes... that's annoying).
Here's the debug id:
D53001229
PS: I'm working on a surface pro 2.
You can certainly try to work through: https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
see if that helps. It has done that more than once for the same citation?
The document has around 90 pages and 340 footnotes (and way more to come), its size is 256kb.