Zotero/NCBI integration of saved collections

SalishSea

NCBI (the pubmed folks, and lots more!) are promoting new features for saving collections of articles, including social networking tools, etc. Very cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbNE9fy3sWI

I wonder if Zotero could work with NCBI to push collection savings directly into Zotero? Under this model, NCBI would allow you to speecify a zotero account as a valid output option, and with server passwords, etc. data would flow direct from NCBI to Zotero, and from there via Sync to the user, rather that the current model which is: NCBI-> User -> SyncServer.

Thoughts?

I'll take this further. Could one also implement a episodic (daily, weekly, monthly) update search from pubmed and push that directly into Zotero?

Just some ideas. Wonderful wonderful tool. Thank you again!

ajlyon

It's now quite straightforward to do this: http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/server_api/write_api

That said, I don't know of any sites that have actually implemented this in any substantial way.

adamsmith

Zotero is stretchted for programmer resources, so I doubt that they'll be able to implement this - but the infrastructure is all there: Zotero now has a write API and NCBI could take advantage of that to do, for example, exactly what you suggest.

At least the way you suggest this to happen all of the remaining coding would have to take place on the NCBI site - but since they would have to format the data specifically for Zotero I'm not sure if they'd be open.

There are also plans to allow translators to run on the Zotero server instead of the local client - once that is implemented, this would be much easier and could be done with very limited work by the NCBI people or likely even a 3rd party tool/plugin.
Running things as a cron job - i.e. periodically - is generally not a big challenge.