Zotero not producing bibliography in a large document

cyra.patel
Hi, I have a large document (~200 pages) with about 200 or so references. I have disabled automatic updates and have successfully refreshed the document so that the citation numbering is correct throughout the document (it took a while but it worked). But now Zotero will just not insert the bibliography. It was one one drive before but now I'm running it with the file saved on my desktop. I left it running overnight but maybe it didn't work if my screen when to sleep. I still left it again for about 1.5 hours and still nothing. I'm on an older Mac and my hard drive is quite full, but it worked a couple of days ago in another document that was just as big.

Debug ID: D1382578738

A couple of questions:
- what could I be doing wrong?
- If I leave it running in the background can I do other things on my computer, e.g. emails, internet, excel or work in another document?
- how do I know it's going to work? I can leave it running for a while and can see it's doing things in the debug output but I can't tell if it will eventually work.

Thanks for any help.
  • adomasven
    Do you run Word in full-screen/desktop mode? Does it work if you have both Zotero and Word on the same screen. Make sure that both are visible when you press the Add/Edit Bibliography button.
  • cyra.patel
    No I'm not in full-screen mode. And yes both Zotero and word are on the same screen.

    I restarted it and tried it again after restarting my computer, I've had it running for about 6 hours now and still nothing. It almost seems to be stuck in a loop, it keeps either running the lines below or doing a bunch of things and then coming back to this and getting stuck on it:

    (3)(+0859214): Last backup of database 'zotero' was less than 1440 minutes ago -- skipping backup

    (4)(+0020083): SELECT itemID FROM items JOIN deletedItems USING (itemID) WHERE libraryID=? AND dateDeleted <= DATE('NOW', '-30 DAYS') [1]
  • cyra.patel
    After leaving it to run for >8 hours, I still have no bibliography. I am going to try a few things and see if it works (e.g. removing all images to make the document smaller).

    Updated debug code is: D1555523118
  • adomasven
    The bibliography insertion is stuck on Zotero attempting to retrieve citations from Word. Which would generally mean that any attempts to update this document, such as refresh it, would have to fail in a similar manner.

    You could try the final step in Troubleshooting Errors in Word Processor Documents, just to see if you can identify a part of the document that is making it fail, or at least work much slower.

    200 pages is a lot, but for Mac Word plugin the number of references is more important, which at 200 is not too bad. Unless this is a fairly old mac, it doesn't usually take more than 15 minutes for something of this size.
  • cyra.patel
    Thank you for your help. My Mac is quite old (MacBook Pro Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015, running iOS Monterey v12.7.6) and I'm finding many programs no longer support/update this version. The memory on my Mac is also quite depleted.

    I eventually saved a copy of my document and deleted everything that I didn't need to generate the bibliography. I had a number of images for the PDF pages of my papers and it had made the Word file size huge. After deleting everything I didn't need for the bib, I went from 205 pages to around 90, and file size from 67MB to <1MB. Bibliography generated in a minute.

    I think all these factors meant Zotero was getting stuck. But now I have this as a workaround and will just copy in my bibliography into my master document. I don't need to update the document on an ongoing basis so this works for me.
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