Reference Global needs a specific (rather than DOI-based) translator

mark

De Gruyter's Reference Global (RG) platform is huge and includes many journals.
Currently, importing items from RG works because there are DOIs on the page, but this fails to grab the PDF.

By the looks of it, it should be fairly easy to make a translator. This essentially repeats an open request by me that is now almost two years old. Only more journals have been added to the RG platform since then, so it has become more urgent.

ajlyon

You know how these things go. Translators are rarely written unless a self-interested person goes out and learns how to do so. You're right-- there should be a translator. I am not likely to write one in the short term, since I still have a lot of sites in my own field that I would like to support better. [Edit: My not-for-personal-research-use translator contributions are largely limited to troubleshooting and maintaining the 301 translators currently in the repository.] I know that one of the recent translator contributors has noted that he'd make a translator for a modest sum -- for that matter, I wouldn't be against such an arrangement myself. Otherwise, the best approach is to take a look at the translator documentation -- it is relatively straightforward for someone with a little bit of programming experience and some patience. If any questions arise, the denizens of the zotero-dev list (me included) are usually quite willing to help troubleshoot and get the translator polished and ready to ship.

Another approach is to encourage/pressure de Gruyters to contribute a translator-- HW Wilson (WilsonWeb) did precisely that, since no one volunteered to contribute one and they wanted Zotero users to be happy with WilsonWeb. Similarly, EBSCO contributed the most recent updates to the EBSCO translator, also at the request of libraries and other users.

mark

Thanks. I wish there was a reliable index of repositories and their relative size; that might help any developer to gauge the relative urgency or interest. But you're right of course that this is simply too much work for the few people that can develop translators. I have looked into the process some time ago and was scared away. I might take a look again in the future, I gather Scaffold has been (informally) improved.

I have put in a request with De Gruyter. If more users can do this, please do. Their feedback email address is service@degruyter.com.

adamsmith

there is also a new and improved guide:
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/how_to_write_a_zotero_translator_plusplus