Failed recognition of ISBN

pshughart · 2026-04-21T08:23:05+00:00

This refers to report ID 2071541701 &/OR 363768362. The ISBN: 978-1-4335-9872-2
The copyright 2021 by Mark Dever. This error is common with three other volumes. I just upgraded to Zotero 9. I am using Macbook Pro M1; 16GB; Tahoe 26.3.1(a). I also shutdown the laptop for 2 hours. After logging back in and opening Zotero, I clicked the sync function and tried again. Same result. I am located in the Philippines, Negros Occidental w/stable internet.

Please advise, warm regards, Paul Shughart,

poettli · 2026-04-21T08:43:59+00:00

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/130698/failed-recognition-of-isbn
https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines#don_t_create_redundant_threads

pshughart · 2026-04-21T10:50:48+00:00

Not sure I understand. I just tried again w/ISBN 9781433598722. The same result: Lookup Failed.

Can this be corrected??? Do you need more information from me to help you?

The links above as of a couple hours ago returns the same result for the same ISBN.

There are 5 other ISBNs which return with 'lookup failed'.

Hoping this can be corrected. I am a researcher and need the advantages of Zotero, which I have been using several years during my academic journey.

Warm regards,
Paul Shughart

mjthoraval · 2026-04-21T15:08:33+00:00

As discussed in the other threads pointed by poettli, Zotero is just searching the metadata information in different library catalogues:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/509495/#Comment_509495

The ISBN you are trying to lookup is just not referenced anywhere, so there is no way for Zotero to retrieve any metadata.

In such cases, you can try to import the metadata from the publisher's page of the book: https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero

adamsmith · 2026-04-21T16:06:29+00:00

(well, it's on Open Worldcat, but that's increasingly locked down, so people get more unsuccessful lookups than they used to.
Google books has an API and actually pretty good metadata, but it's heavily rate limited, so I don't think it's usable here.
OpenLibrary has a large corpus but ime the metadata is just too poor quality to use (e.g., I don't think they have subtitles for most books).

So I'm just not quite sure what to do about this.

If individual users are very interested and use a lot of books, it'd be fairly easy to (vibe)code a google books API translator and you can then get a free personal API token from Google Books for your local machine which gives you 1k queries/day

mjthoraval · 2026-04-21T16:52:49+00:00

@adamsmith If I search for "978-1-4335-9872-2" in https://worldcat.org/, I do not get any result. What is the way to see that it is on Open Worldcat?

adamsmith · 2026-04-21T17:37:34+00:00

Sorry, that was referring to the other ISBNs from the linked thread, like 9798299322149 (which also currently don't import even though it's on worldcat). I suspect there's something wrong with the last ISBN -- there's not a single google search it for it.