Chrome extention fails to add citations (stuck on updating GoogleDocs document)

anastasiyka
While working with GoogleDocs document I was trying to add new citation.
Green bar appeared, than Zotero informed me that another user is working on the document and it is locked from editing. Strange, but I clicked "override" as I am sure I am the only one working on the document.
Green bar persisted for some time, than search field appeared. I searched and selected required citation. Status bar reached 100% and stuck. At this moment notification appeared that "if updating citations take long time, turn off auto update. Yes/no". Clicking "yes" makes no difference and green bar persists like forever.

I was trying to reload desktop program as well as refreshing web-page and Chrome for couple of times. No difference.
Previously everything worked perfect.

Please help, I need to edit urgently my article before publication. A lot of changes in bibliography. It may turn a nightmare making it by hand.

Many thanks in advance.

Debug ID: D1833498222
  • adomasven
    Restart Zotero and your browser. Provide a Debug ID from Zotero for an attempt to insert a citation.
  • anastasiyka
    D2127451932
  • adomasven
    That is still a Debug ID from the Connector. We need a Debug ID from the Zotero app.
  • anastasiyka
    That was a debug from the desktop app as described in the instruction. However, the problem appears when adding citation to the GoogleDoc with a Connector, there is no way to add it in a GoogleDoc via a desktop app.
  • adomasven
    Sorry, I may have accidentally looked at the wrong Debug ID. It seems like your document contains over 1200 citations. Is that correct? Did you recently merge it from multiple different documents? We do not recommend working with Zotero on documents of such scope in Google Docs, as the Google Docs editor itself struggles with large documents, and due to the online nature it doesn't work great with very big document, and it is also much harder to troubleshoot when it breaks.

    We recommend moving your document to a different Word Processor. Since you already have problems with it now, it might be impossible to convert the document format in its current state. In that case you should make a copy, and cut the current document into a few smaller pieces and convert them individually, then merge them back in Word or LibreOffice.
  • anastasiyka
    Actually no, it cannot be 1200 citation. Theoretically, it can be only in the case if it counts citations in all copies of the documents, but still in my opinion it’s too much. Yes, I did copy. I made first just one copy, so I could leave the initial variant of the article in the main document and make changes in the copy, but when Zotero crushed, I thought that working with the main document might fix the problem. However, as I managed to make some changes in the copy, and now planned to work with changes in the main document, I had to make another copy from the main document to save initial variant.

    I wanted to work with Google Doc, so my co-author could see how it looked like in a real time.
    I realised that unfortunately it wouldn’t work that way. So now I’m working with the document in Word. Currently, in Word everything goes smoothly. Thank you for now, we may consider problem as resolved.
    I hope in future Zotero will work better with GoogleDocs.
  • adomasven
    edited May 1, 2024
    Ideally we'd want to still figure out what went wrong with your original Google Docs document, since if it isn't a huge document with hundreds of citations it should work fine. How many pages is this document, and how many citations in your estimate does it have? There is a bug that we are unable to reproduce where the bibliography of the document starts duplicating. Did you check at the bottom of the document and see anything strange like that?
  • anastasiyka
    It consists of 37 text pages (font Arial, font size 11) and additional 4 pages of references. I assume there is about 100-150 citations. I haven’t noticed anything strange.
  • adomasven
    It's not a small document, but something that Zotero should handle with reasonable speed.

    If you have time, would you run through the last step of Troubleshooting Errors in Word Processor Documents on a copy of this document? The debug log you have submitted contains an attempt to update over 1200 citations and it would be good to figure out what's causing that to prevent it for you and other users in the future.
Sign In or Register to comment.