ProQuest translation error - New York Times

qenghis

Version: Zotero 3.0.8 standalone
Browser: Chrome
OS: Mac Leopard

When importing old New York Times articles via ProQuest, the Publication field is blank, and the Date field only includes the year, not the day or month.

This is happening with all NYT articles from the early 1900s. Here is one example:
http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/docview/96426181/1392C9DAB8C31A127A4/1

I have not seen this error with any other publications.

adamsmith

thanks - might take a while - unfortunately, the historic newspaper data is a bit sketchy on Proquest, so this type of thing does happen (note if you go to the Abstract/Citation page, there is now month/date and now publication under "Indexing Details" ). And since it's not very consistent between different newspapers changes aren't trivial.


The site does export pretty decent RIS (under export), which Zotero imports nicely so you could try that for the time being. (and we may try to use that for the translator, too).

qenghis

OK, thanks for the workaround suggestions. It's nothing urgent, just a minor pain, but I wanted to make sure you were aware.

adamsmith

as I said - reports like this are very much appreciated - this is not the type of thing we notice without user input.

aurimas

@qenghis the translator has been updated. You can wait up to 24 hours for it to update automatically or update manually (Preferences -> General tab -> Update now). Thanks for reporting.

@adamsmith I hope you didn't start messing around with this yet.

The site does export pretty decent RIS (under export), which Zotero imports nicely so you could try that for the time being. (and we may try to use that for the translator, too).

The RIS export is fairly complete, but it is quite tricky to fetch from within a translator (though maybe still possible). It seems that the server takes some time to prepare the RIS file (for whatever reason) and you have to keep querying until you get the file.

I've looked into using the BibTeX output (under Cite). It has both publicationTitle and a more complete date. Unfortunately, that output is 4 HTTP requests away from the citation/abstract page (I couldn't figure out how to cut it down to less). I implemented this method anyway for future reference (https://github.com/aurimasv/translators/commit/d3ccac1c5d40a223fcc0f7845eecbfa9f1e69f70), but I don't like this ridiculous overhead, so I didn't push it.

I ended up parsing the publication title and date from the byline, which works OK, I think. I've only tested this on a couple articles.

adamsmith

hadn't touched this, no. Thanks for looking into the RIS.