Zotero is stuck handling entries with big author list

FoxWise
Dear all,

I didn't want to revive a post from 2015, but I guess this is a duplicate of: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/51086/zotero-is-stuck-when-handling-very-many-author-names

Is it possible to edit (e..g reduce to 20 authors max) the long author lists, while importing an entry via Zotero connector on a fly?

Removing thousands of authors one by one from the Zotero entry in the standalone application does not seem feasible.

It is a common practice to have many authors in High-energy physics for papers from big collaborations.
  • aborel
    Indeed such long author lists are common, but Zotero should be able to manage that without too many problems. Can you give an example, and explain exactly how you were trying to import it?
  • FoxWise
    Here are some more details on how I get the freeze.
    It happens in the "Duplicate items" tab while trying to merge.

    Browser: Firefox 120.0
    OS: Ubuntu 22.04.03
    Zotero Connector: extension for Firefox, version 5.0.114
    Zotero standalone: 6.0.30

    Here is the paper:
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931200857X

    1. Open the paper link
    2. Get the bibtex citation WITHOUT Zotero Connector to the txt file
    3. Remove all the authors from the txt file and copy in the buffer the rest.
    4. Add citation to the Zotero standalone application from Clipboard.
    5. Enable Zotero Connector extension
    6. In Zotero connector choose "Save to Zotero (ScienceDirect)"
    7. Go to the "Duplicate items" tab
    8. Click to select two recently added entries

    Result: It loads after around 19 seconds and during this time a pop-up window "Zotero is not responding" appears 3 times and proposes to quit the application.

    Note: Changing the "master" entry also works very slowly.

    Is this expected?
  • FoxWise
    Is there an update on this? I even forgot that I wrote this post, but I was about to write it again. For me the issue is still persists. If there are too many authors, clicking in the wrong places freezes Zoter completely and the only way to kill the process.
  • adomasven Zotero Team
    Can you produce a Debug ID for an operation that takes a long time?
  • FoxWise
    Please take a look at

    D1112284882
    ~50 authors, delay is noticeable, but everything works

    D1372957273
    and
    D1459043410
    ~350 authors, delay causes "Application not responding" pop-up, but still loads if waiting a bit.

    For ~2500 authors I still had "Application not responding" after waiting for 5-10 minutes, so I couldn't submit the debug log, because I had to crash the application to exit...

  • adomasven Zotero Team
    Does it happen in Troubleshooting Mode (Help -> Restart in Troubleshooting Mode)?
  • FoxWise
    After clicking "Restart in Troubleshooting Mode" Zotero exits and never restarts for me again. I use 8.0.3 (64-bit) on almalinux 9.

    Could you reproduce the problem described above on your side?
    Or did you see what caused the delays in the debug logs?
  • adomasven Zotero Team
    I suspect it's the better bibtex plugin. Restarting in troubleshooting mode disables all extensions, but you could do that manually and restart Zotero and see if the issue still occurs.
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