can't refresh citations or open document preferences

I'm working on a document that's several hundred pages long and had no problems, but I've updated some of the citations and wanted to refresh the citations, but whenever I click on the refresh button or the document preferences, Zotero either freezes or doesn't respond at all. In the last 24 hours or so, I've managed to insert one citation. I've reinstalled the plugins, checked the settings in Word and Zotero… I've tried changing citation styles (I'm using a custom style)… no luck. Is anyone else facing this issue?
I'm running Word on Mac / Ventura.
  • For a document that long on Mac Word, refreshing may take a long time — you may just need to let it go for a while. Unfortunately Word integration is significantly slower on macOS.

    Opening the Document Preferences window shouldn't be slow, though, so that's a little weird.

    Do you have automatic citation updates disabled? You'd obviously want to check occasionally that refreshing still works, given enough time, but the point of disabling citation updates is to make actually inserting citations much faster.
  • Yes, while I was working on the document, I had disabled updates and manually updated them once or twice a day. I am just trying to do a final update of the document, so this is a little frustrating. I even tried making a copy and unlinking the citations to finish things up manually, but even that didn’t work.
  • edited March 8, 2023
    How long did you wait? A refresh on Mac Word in a huge document can take hours. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about that — the interface we have to Mac Word is just really slow.

    You can go to Help → Debug Output Logging → View Output in Zotero to confirm that it's still doing something.
  • I waited about 20-30 minutes, but I’ll try again and take a look at the output - thanks!
  • Trying this again - when I first tried opening document preferences with the output displayed, it said the request was already in progress and not executing. I submitted the log. Then I tried the refresh button - it appears to be doing something.
  • It worked once, but it didn't finish the refresh, I think. I tried again, but I got the two following messages back to back (D1646630067)
    Integration: MacWord16-refresh:'/Applications/Microsoft Word.app/' invoked
    Integration: Request already in progress; not executing MacWord16 refresh
  • That just means it's still running. If you think it's stuck, you should restart Zotero.
  • edited 29 days ago
    How can I check a refresh is in progress? Refresh doesn't seem to be working. Also using Zotero with MS Word on Mac. My document is only 30 pages long, but I was just about to submit it for my deadline. Prior bibliography updates didn't take too long.
  • @AdeleEff: See above:
    You can go to Help → Debug Output Logging → View Output in Zotero to confirm that it's still doing something.
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