Word is not responding and slow with Zotero for ~400 footnote references

jadekelly
I am writing a thesis chapter of approximately 40 pages, with ~400 footnote references generated and managed by the Zotero plugin. First, the document is slow to open and is non-responsive for a few minutes. Then, while editing or scrolling, the document hangs requiring tens of seconds to minutes to proceed for most operations.

This problem does not occur for many of my other, simpler documents in Word that have Zotero references. I do not wish to break this document up as it is a coherent chapter.

This problem has persisted through updating both Word and Zotero. Current installed versions:
- Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2501 Build 16.0.18429.20044) 64-bit - Zotero, 7.0.11 (64-bit)

I did not record the previous versions of Word and Zotero, which also had this problem (but it was Zotero 6, not 7).

I updated the Word plug-in from Zotero (i.e. Zotero->Settings->Cite->Microsoft Word->Reinstall Microsoft World Add-in), which worked successfully.

I have unchecked "Automatically update citations" in Document Preferences and use the manual refresh option.

I can verify this is not a computer performance issue; the computer is only using 61% RAM, and there is no significant CPU loading.

I believe this is a Zotero issue, as if I "Unlink Citations" via the Zotero plugin, the document becomes editable and responsive. (It did take several minutes to unlink citations).

Is there a setting in Zotero to make it performant in these kinds of cases?


  • bwiernik
    Unfortunately, Word for Mac in general will degrade in performance with 400 footnotes (generated by Zotero or not). Disabling automatic updates in Document Preferences in the Zotero menu in Word could help, but most of the slowdown is coming from Word. Editing the document in Word for Windows would be much faster if possible.
  • jadekelly
    To clarify, this is on a Windows operating system, not a Mac:

    OS: Windows 11 Home
    Version: 24H2
    For reference, I checked the OS was up to date as well, Updated on: 1/‎15/‎2025

    As mentioned, unlinking Zotero references removes the slowdown; it seems clear most of the slowdown is from Zotero. To be explicit, there are still the same 400 footnotes in this test, they are just not dynamically linked to Zotero.
  • damnation
    Of course it will be faster as it will not have to "check" each footnote now.
    "Unlinking" renders your citations plain old text.

    Your best way of dealing with this is to have automatic updates off and only click on refresh when you can let the PC idle on its own (lunch break, evening etc.).
  • jadekelly
    edited 16 days ago
    Please see original post:

    "I have unchecked "Automatically update citations" in Document Preferences and use the manual refresh option."

    I have attached a screenshot to confirm this.

    To further clarify, there is a significant slowdown even while automatic updates are off, and I agree that the slowdown is it "checking" each footnote from/through Zotero. I would have expected turning Automatic Updates OFF to have a similar speed/performance to unlinking the references from Zotero, but this is clearly not the case.  

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u7151203/y231hwv2jfh7v7lpx2o7.png
  • dstillman
    edited 15 days ago
    First, the document is slow to open and is non-responsive for a few minutes. Then, while editing or scrolling, the document hangs requiring tens of seconds to minutes to proceed for most operations.
    It sounds like you're just talking about Word performance, not Zotero performance.

    "Automatically update citations" would speed up Zotero citation inserts, but that has nothing to do with Word performance when not using the plugin. Unlinking citations could fix a Word performance problem by converting Zotero citations to plain text, but that doesn't make it a problem in Zotero. You'd see the same slow performance if you removed the Zotero plugin from Word.

    Zotero inserts standard Word fields, and it's then up to Word to render them. We don't get many reports of performance problems in Word itself, so there might be something particular about your document that's contributing to this. You can try the last step on Troubleshooting Errors in Word Processor Documents to see if that helps (in this case, just following the principle of cutting down a copy of the document in halves to see if you can identify some problematic section, not actually reproducing any Zotero error, which this isn't).

    You could also try changing to a non-footnote citation style in a copy of the document just to see if that affects Word performance.
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