Saving Gale references to Zotero is too slow

RinaEspiritu1

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u16971333/n3bml9i0d8l16nbil3en.png

I clear my cache and cookies, I used an app called Clean up My Mac to make sure it's not my laptop making it slow. I restarted Zotero with the troubleshooting mode. I turned off and on my laptop. I closed chrome. I close remove the zotero extension and put it back. Nothing is working. I have 8,000 articles to import on Covidence. It takes three minutes to save 20 references. What are my options here?

dstillman

Generally you don't want to try to save thousands of items at the same time using the Zotero Connector — you want to look for a way to export an entire search to RIS/BibTeX/etc. and import the file into Zotero. I don't know if there's a way to do that on Gale.

To save from a search results page on Gale, Zotero needs to, for every single article, 1) make a request for the article page, 2) make a separate request for a RIS file, 3) save a full-text PDF if one is available, and 4) save a snapshot of the article page. That's not going to be fast and could easily get you blocked if you do it in large numbers.

You can try temporarily disabling the saving of PDFs and snapshots (two separate settings) in the General pane of the Zotero settings. But it would still be >16,000 requests that would very likely get you blocked or rate-limited. Your university proxy could also be slowing this down.

RinaEspiritu1

Thank you so much for taking time to respond. Im actually saving them to Zotero in batches of 20 references because each search page have 20 of them. Would it still be expected to be this slow? It takes 3-4 mins when initially it would take 30 seconds. I'm supposed to hear back from Gale to see if there's anything on their end to make it faster. I feel there should be a feature where I can save the whole search so I can end up with one ris file to import to Covidence for screening. I called my campus IT and they told me there's nothing they can do on their end. I did mention the word proxy (I absolutely don't know what this means exactly but something with server?) but he said he doesn't know anything about it either. Maybe I should accept my fate and just surrender to how slow it is. I'm calculating about 13 more hours of work doing this.

adamsmith

You want to talk to your library, which has the contract with Gale (and often have experts on evidence synthesis). They are most likely to have ideas on this

dstillman

And to be clear, the question for them would be about exporting an entire search to RIS. They're not going to help with the Zotero Connector (but you can do the things I say to turn off PDF and snapshot saving).