EBSCO little bugs

Mishkafofer

Zotero captures Articles from EBSCO quit nicely, but there are two problems:
1. It won't catch URL, so i cant press VIEW button to get back to the article.
2. In DOI field, it writes ARTICLE

dstillman

It should not save a URL to the URL field, as the URL field is meant to be the canonical source for the bibliographic item online. A database URL should never be saved there, and any translators that do are doing so incorrectly.

An alternative would be to attach a link, but what's your reason for wanting to return to the EBSCO page? I'll let someone comment on the DOI issue (which may or may not be fixed in the soon-to-be-released EBSCO translator update), but with a proper DOI you could go to the actual canonical source by clicking the View button.

Mishkafofer

I see few advantages to adding URL to Journal data:
1. It's easier to move Zotero Data than Articles, some times the articles are scanned images (above 5,10,15 mb).
2. It's easy to shear articles and no need to send files.
Few day ago, a friend asked for a list of article on manufacturing methods, so i exported the library in HTML form (he don't use Zotero).
3. Sometimes i work in a hurry to create a bibliography and few weeks later find some bugs in data, so i prefer to come back to a source and see the original data.

ajlyon

The DOI issue was not yet fixed, but it is now. We were assuming that the M3 field in the RIS output contained the DOI-- the field is a general use miscellaneous field, and EBSCO apparently uses it for a human-readable article type.

This is now fixed in the repository. The URL behavior is correct.

Mishkafofer

About URL behavior:
I just want to mention that in ScienceDirect, Zotero do collect URL from the site, so grew accustomed to that and thought that there is some kind of problem with EBSCO translator.
Now i understand that this is not a purpose of URL field in Zotero.

Thank you for your quick reply.

ajlyon

The URL field should refer to a canonical representation of the item (specifically, it should be a canonical identifier (URI) that resolves to the article itself). It's actually somewhat hard to determine when a URL is a stable, canonical representation, and when it's just a listing on a database. EBSCO is, as far as I know, solely a database of articles (and book sections, books), so its URLs are generally not worth keeping. Some other sites, like those running Highwire such as Oxford Journals, generally can give us stable canonical identifiers (URIs), and we should be saving their URLs. For non-database sites, like newspapers, we always save the URL.

As Dan notes, a DOI, if present, is the best identifier we can get, so there is little reason to save a URL if we have a valid DOI.

If you'd like, we can save a link to the result page as an attachment. I'm not sure how useful that is for people, but some translators do.

adamsmith

links are useless for EBSCO, because they're tied to session IDs - i.e. you won't be able to open the link at a later time, even if you're on the same network/proxy. That's not the case for many other sites like JSTOR and, I think, sciencedirect.