Zotero painfully slow

AlesPrapro
edited November 14, 2021
Hi,

I am using Zotero 5.0.96.3 to edit references in my text/library, which has 1190 references. It started to add references slower pretty soon, but lately it got painfully slow. So I can wait up to 40 min to add one reference and I've had enough now.

I updated my Mac to Big Sur recently (I don't know if that has something to do with it as well). I read in some previous discussions that you can unclick Automatically update citations, but haven't found really clear instructions about how to add citations with that option unticked.

I would be grateful for any information on how to solve this problem. Thanks!
  • dstillman
    https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-5-0-36/#faster-citing-in-large-documents
  • AlesPrapro
    Hi,

    Thanks for your link. I've seen that. I still don't know what to do exactly. Because when I try to add a citation after disabling Automatic citations updating in my Zotero word plugin, nothing happens. The brackets (citation) and the red bar don't appear. When I try to click on Preferences in Zotero plugin again, I can't access them anymore. Any thoughts on what to do?

    A.
  • AlesPrapro
    Update: after 10 minutes and nothing on the screen, the message 'Zotero experienced an error updating your document' appeared. I clicked 'No' and tried to insert the citation again. This time (Citation) and red bar appeared, I entered the citation, clicked ok, and then ... after 15 minutes of something going on, the same message appeared 'Zotero experienced an error updating your document'.
  • AlesPrapro
    Any thoughts?
  • djross3
    edited November 19, 2021
    This may help: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/75544/word-2016-mac-plugin-very-slow

    (The error you are receiving may need to be resolved separately, but at least you can work on the document this way. There may be one or more corrupted cites in the document, which will need to be manually fixed, once you find them. Working temporarily on a Windows computer might allow you to do that more quickly, or you could work on separate chunks of the document at a time until you find the problematic parts.)
  • AlesPrapro
    Thanks for the tip!

    How do I find and correct corrupted citations? (what constitutes a corrupted citation?)

  • djross3
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/debugging_broken_documents
  • AlesPrapro
    djross3, thanks for your information! What I did was cut my document in shorter segments that have no more than 200 citations each, pasted entire bibliography from the original document at the end of each one and inserted a straw (not needed) citation at the end of cut texts so that Zotero renumbered citations and sorted out bibliography at the end. I found out that message 'Zotero experienced an error updating your document' doesn't appear anymore and that Zotero runs really fast. Seconds for segments up to 50 citations. Ok, for segments that have cca 150+ citations it does take 5-10 minutes, but for me that is acceptable. Hopefully it continues to work like that. The only thing that remains is to put the text back together again after corrections.
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