find full text not working as well as expected

kate.nyhan · November 14, 2022

Hi, I was trying to retrieve PDFs for a set of 318 records, which have DOIs. Zotero only retrieved 78 of them. I did some spot checks, and while some of the not-found articles are from journals my institution doesn't subscribe to, at least one of them (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20200097) is available free in PMC.
Anything I can tweak to get the find full text tool working better? Thanks.

adamsmith · November 14, 2022

The issue with that particular paper appears to be the data from Unpaywall -- Zotero tries to get the open access PDF but fails (I'm guessing because there's no PDF on PMC) -- nothing you'd be able to do about that specific case I think.

The most important thing you can do is to make sure you're on campus (or connected with a true VPN that changes your IP range). Also, go in batches so that you don't get locked out in case you hammer a particular publisher with dozens of very fast requests.

In general the feature only works so well because it just follows the DOI in most cases and doesn't use your openURL resolver -- my tests were closer to 1/2 of PDFs, but obviously depends heavily on the sample.