Zotero for Macbook is SLOW for LARGE DOCUMENTS

lippertwe
I'm working on a PhD dissertation. So figure 70,000 words, 550 citations, 500 sources. I tried building the bibliography. Crashed multiple times. Gave up, and built the bibliography by copying and pasting about 15,000 words at a time, creating/refreshing the bibliography each time. It worked - but it was an inefficient process. Zotero - you need to improve performance with Mac. First, Macs are a very common OS for researchers. Second, claims that "Apple is closed" ring hollow when every other developer manages to build software for Mac with much higher performance demands. PS: I'm a paying Zotero user.
  • adamsmith
    Just to be clear -- no one claims this has anything to do with Mac being closed (Mac OS is not any more closed than Windows). The reason is the limited and slow API (i.e. the way to communicate with other applications) that Word for Mac has available and I don't think Zotero believes they can do much about that unless Microsoft does. That's also, of course, not something most other apps have to deal with: the Zotero app on Mac itself, especially in version 7 (currently beta) is at least as fast as on any other OS.

    (And you pay for file storage & sync; Zotero itself is and has always been free).
  • lippertwe
    thanks for the comment... im not a programmer, so i cant dispute one way or the other. it is just frustrating, and i am venting due to challenges in the last steps of my dissertation drafting taking longer than needed due to software issues. regardless of where the fault is, it's very frustrating!
  • adamsmith
    FWIW, it should definitely not crash, so unless by 'crash' you mean 'freeze' we can troubleshoot that if you're still interested. This should have just worked by letting Zotero and Word run for a long time to create the final update & bibliography.
  • lippertwe
    so what happened when i tried to create the bibliography, is i got the rainbow volleyball (or whatever you want to call it). it wasnt clear to me if it was just thinking, or had stopped running. i didnt have hours to wait only to find out that it had crashed. thus i just went ahead and copy and pasted one section at a time and created/updated the bibliography. perhaps you know if i should have waited.
  • adamsmith
    yeah, waiting would have very likely worked, but yes, you want to budget a fair amount of time for that (as in: possibly a couple of hours)
  • lippertwe
    also , i am now trying to edit footnotes to remove
    omit author. it is taking 4-10 minutes… or more for each update for each citation! what’s going on? can anything be done? do i just have to break down the document into smaller bits?
  • adamsmith
    If these are final edits on your final dissertation, you can consider making a copy, unlinking citations and just not using Zotero for those at all.

    Otherwise, making sure that automatically update citations is unchecked (Document Preferences) will help, but really it's basically infeasible to edit anything in a book/dissertation length document in Word for Mac, so splitting into chapters for anything but the final bib is the way to go, yes.
  • webbz01
    I have a 13000 word paper which I thought Zotero on Word for Mac would be able to cope with. This is not uncommon length for a draft journal paper in my discipline. When I click refresh to updated the bibliography, I get the spinning beachball for 5+ minutes... is this normal? It doesn't work with tracked changes (which I need to use for collaborative writing) so that breaks the workflow... Anything we can do to get it working better?
  • bwiernik
    Removing the bibliography will make Zotero work much faster on word for Mac. You can add it back when you are finished editing
  • dstillman
    edited January 15, 2024
    A Refresh could still be slow even without a bibliography, though. @webbz01, as noted above, for a large document, the main thing to do would be to make sure "Automatically update citations" is unchecked in the plugin's Document Preferences window. (That will replace the bibliography with a placeholder if it's there, which is why removing the bibliography doesn't really matter.) Then avoid clicking Refresh until you actually need to. It's not a bad idea to do a refresh every now and then ahead of time just to get a sense of how long the update will take, so you're not stuck waiting before a deadline, but as noted above, that could easily take hours in a large document.

    We're working with Microsoft on a new integration method that should speed things up in Word for Mac.
Sign In or Register to comment.