Mendeley vs Zotero 5 speed issue

edited August 11, 2017
Hi,

I'm trying to make the switch from Mendeley to Zotero, as Mendeley seems to have been abandoned by Elsevier. I've imported my references ok but my biggest concern before fully switching is an issue with the speed of Zotero in comparison to Mendeley?

As an example, I set up a test word document with 25 references and a bibliography in both applications. I then reformatted the Style from one journal style type to another (e.g. Vancouver to BMJ) in both Mendeley and Zotero. Mendeley took 3-4 seconds to do this, Zotero took over 10 seconds. Similarly adding new citations and 'refreshing' takes about three times longer in Zotero.

This is a massive discrepancy in speed? Given Mendeley hasn't been updated properly in over a year, I would have expected the Zotero code and application to be much more efficient? I'm reluctant to make the full switch when I writing a thesis that might have 400+ references and might become a major issue.

ps. I've repeated the test on two Macs with clean install of Zotero: both high spec Macs, one running Sierra, one running El Capitan, Word 2016 (latest updates).

Is this a known issue? What is the cause? Any fix in the pipeline?
  • Some improvements are indeed in the pipeline. Not sure if we'll go up to the speed of Mendeley for full-doc updates, but we have a nice upcoming feature of delaying full-updates, which will make every citation insert and edit take a couple of seconds max.
  • Good to know, but why the discrepancy? How does Mendeley achieve this process so efficiently without delaying updates? Why can't it be replicated?
  • edited August 11, 2017
    We've spent some time speeding up the update process in Zotero, which will probably help quite a bit. Otherwise there might be some reasons due to how the integration plugins are coded and the underlying programming language used by Zotero and Mendeley respectively.
  • Certainly appreciate the active development going on with Zotero - it is the reason I plan to move from Mendeley. I look forward to the updates and hope they bring Zotero close enough to the speed of Mendeley that is no longer such an obvious discriminating factor between the two packages. Thanks.
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