Updated Ovid

swaldron

Ovid has recently updated their website and the zotero icon is now no longer appearing in the toolbar. There is no problem with other sites eg amazon / New York Times.

An example URL is

http://ovidsp.uk.ovid.com/sp-3.2.1/ovidweb.cgi?&S=FENPPDGGPEHFCJICFNDLFGBGJIAEAA00&Complete+Reference=S.sh.14|1|1

Hope this can be rectified

dstillman

Please don't double-post. I removed your other thread.

swaldron

Apologies. Would you be able to give me an idea as to what the problem is / if it can be rectified?

swaldron

Just to clarify, I have the latest versions of firefox & zotero and have updated the translators under zotero preferences. Other sites are working perfectly, and it appears to be an isolated issue with Ovid. Report I.D. 1581797865.

adamsmith

problem is the Ovid translator for Zotero, it can be fixed, but timeline is unclear - there is a lot going on with translators at the moment.

swaldron

ok thank you very much for keeping me informed.

Andrew Hugman

I'm having the same problem that I can not see the Zotero icon in my address bar with OvidSP where previously I have been able to see. Here's a random search example:

http://ovidsp.tx.ovid.com/sp-3.2.4b/ovidweb.cgi

Any updates on its reolution?

Clearly there must be a huge number of medical professionals, such as my self, which would find Zotero redundant if this continues not to work with our main medical literature search engine, since Ovid in all its guises seem to be the health organisations preferred option to search & access full text articles.

adamsmith

Andrew - translators are currently mainly written and maintained by one unpaid volunteer. Ajlyon is doing an incredible amount of work and is getting faster and faster at this but still there is only so much he can do.

For several other people it has worked to lobby database vendors to provide their own translator updates (Wilson, EBSCO) - I'd encourage you to contact Ovid about that.
At a minimum, they could provide cleaner output data - you already have an export to RIS option. If at least that worked decently well that'd be a very viable workaround, but it doesn't. Partly that's because of, I believe, the type of the RIS, and partly that's because the RIS data is bad (e.g. all journal articles are marked as ELEC - i.e. electronic resource - rather than JOUR for journal.

Andrew Hugman

Thank you Adam for your speedy explanation.

I had wondered previously about contacted Ovid, but pessimistically assumed that due to the global enormity of the Ovid organisation any such email would quickly be lost into the virtual ether.

To that end, do you have any particular email address for a sympathetic responder at OvidSP / WoltersKluwer? Then they could be lobbied collectively by Zotero users frustrated at OvidSP apparent disconnection with Zotero?

Might it be a good idea to have a links / email address page in the Zotero forums of any other such sites that Zotero needs translators for?

Thanks again for the update and please keep up the good work team.

ajlyon

In some cases, library staff supporting Zotero users have contacted vendors. Zotero has little to no direct contact with database providers, but your librarians and library technical support personnel should have representatives they can contact.

As adamsmith notes, OvidSP should at least improve their RIS and other metadata export functions-- not only to make Zotero support easier, but for all Ovid users who use reference management software.

I may get a chance to look at this -- if I do, I think I'll build off of their proprietary XML export format, which provides pretty much all the data we need. In any case, this won't happen today, and probably not tomorrow.

ajlyon

And don't forget -- Ovid may seem big, but we're bigger. Really.

adamsmith

librarians are also particularly good because, in the end, they are the ones with the "stick", because at most institutions the library makes the purchasing decisions for major databases.
And in general I wouldn't underestimate customer service - I'd start by sending an e-mail to support@ovid.com, making clear that you're a customer from a subscribing institution and see what happens.
You can point them, if you want, to this thread as well as to the Zotero development listserv if they have any questions.
http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev

megan.fitzgibbons

Does anyone have further news on an Ovid translator?

ajlyon

The advice of talking to your librarians/purchasers about this still holds. I could do this if I had a day or so to dedicate to it, but I don't see that happening in the near future. I would, however, be happy to work with Ovid developers to make their site work with Zotero or to craft the translator.

megan.fitzgibbons

Thanks, I am in fact a librarian and have been in contact with an Ovid rep. He sent me information about importing Ovid records into Zotero (which I can share if anyone is interested), but I'll need to talk with him more about the idea of translators--it doesn't seem that he understood that this is what I was asking about.

mich0902

Hello Megan,

I am a librarian too and been hoping for a solution to this for months. I would be very interested to know what your rep told you. I did not contact mine about this yet however, wanted to see what Zotero had to say first. The RIS export trick works fine but a faster way to do it would be great.

ajlyon

I've worked a little on this, but I'm having a mess of a time getting access to the RIS‌ records in any efficient way. My mainly-broken code is at: http://github.com/ajlyon/zotero-bits/raw/master/Ovid.js

It won't fix this, but it's a start-- it now detects items in the new Ovid, but still can't save. This is one of many cases where they've made the logic for pulling citation metadata quite obscure, so it'd take more time than I can currently volunteer to finish mucking through the details. If you do speak with an Ovid rep, please let them know that I'd be happy to work with them to find an efficient way of pulling the RIS or other standard metadata for each selected item-- they can post to http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev and I'll see what we can do. Since their devs wrote this system, they can probably point to, or add, a clean way to do this.

abt

Thanks for the advice and attempts to address this issue. I've just sent an email to Ovid customer support about this - we'll see what they have to say.

In the meantime, seeing as the database I use most is Medline, my workaround for importing individual references is going to be copying and pasting the unique identifier number into Pubmed and saving from there. I see that Pubmed's interface is updated and easier to use, so I might even switch from OvidSP to Pubmed (which is open-access anyway).

abt

And the response from Ovid:

Thank you for contacting WK Health Technical Support.

There are plans to make OvidSP compatible with Zotero – this will be enabled in a future release of the platform. I’m afraid I cannot give you an exact date at this very moment, but have added your comments on the enhancement suggestion item that our development team currently have.

Do let me know if you have other questions in the meantime!

adamsmith

wow, let's hope their devs are as fast as their customer service reps...

jano_riha

Good afternoon,

I have come across this thread as I am currently working with Ovid ATLA Religion Database + ATLAS. Indeed, it is very incovenient one has to do everything manually. There is a workaround in the form of using other databases to retrieve citations, but it is very time consuming and tedious to do it in this way. Moreover, there are entries in Ovid ATLA, which are completely unique...

Anyway, regarding the recent development reported above, do you think I could help the issue if I wrote to Ovid Support as well?

Regards
JR

ajlyon

Yes, definitely write to Ovid, and you may want to mention this to your library contacts as well -- there must be a person with a direct contact in Ovid, and that person can make sure the message is heard.

jano_riha

Dear Avram,

This is to inform you I have written both to a contact person from my university and to Ovid. I hope it could help, at least in the longer perspective. Surely, it would make a difference, if many people wrote to Ovid, not only a couple of individuals.

Best wishes
JR

jano_riha

Dear Avram,

I have already gotten replies both from Ovid and the CUCC (Charles University Computer Centre). In case of Ovid, it seems they are probably willing to deal with the issue somehow, they promised to contact me again. In case of the CUCC, I have been directed to a person responsible for Ovid. I will let you know about the results as soon as I learn anything important.

Regards
JR

adamsmith

with some delay, but the efforts of the people contacting Ovid have paid of - there is now a Zotero translator for Ovid, supplied by Ovid Technologies. Try it out and let us know if there are any problems - we'll try to fix them or pass them on to the folks at Ovid.

Thanks to everyone involved.