Importing ISSN - problems with Russian ISSNs

agapan · May 3, 2013

[I posted this in a discussion about PubMed problems but on Adam Smith's advice start a new thread here:]

If I use an ISSN from Russia, I get PubMed references, but the journal articles I'm wanting citations from are about diplomacy between Russia and Korea...

Example:
http://elibrary.ru/title_about.asp?id=7922
ISSN печатной версии ISSN: 0130-3864

imports " Uptake of radiolabeled glucose analogues by organotypic pia arachnoid cultures" from Brain Research 100. (for which the ISSN = 0006-8993), and "Tidsskrift for den Norske lægeforening: tidsskrift for praktisk medicin, ny række" about neuroleptics whose ISSN is 0029-2001, PMID: 3864.

I'm new on Zotero and not knowledgeable about the ISSN system but assume they are unique IDs worldwide. Any guidance would be appreciated. ISSN numbers for Korean, European and US journals work fine. I don't speak Russian, so importing documents via ISSN is my only way to get the data. Thanks.
[Firefox 20 Zotero 4]

aurimas · May 3, 2013

you cannot import items into Zotero based on ISSN. ISSN is a unique identifier for a journal, not an article, so I'm not sure what you expect to import using an ISSN. You are getting PubMed items because PubMed IDs are (for the most part) 8 digits long, so Zotero assumes that that's what you are looking for.

adamsmith · May 3, 2013

(it actually looks like he's getting 4-digit PMIDs because of the hyphen, but same story).
That said, didn't we have elibrary working natively at some point?

ajlyon · May 3, 2013

I got eLibrary working natively several months ago, albeit with less complete support than we had when I first wrote the translator, before they redesigned the page.

ajlyon · May 3, 2013

The problem is that the page agapan posted is a journal description, not an article or a list of articles. We don't have a journal type in Zotero, and so the translator doesn't show anything for that page.

agapan · May 4, 2013

Thanks aurimas, jlyon and adamsmith for your responses. I was confusing ISSN with DOI. The Russian archives we are using don't give DOIs but some do give ISSNs so I tried them, expecting (unreasonably) to get at least the journal information. Zotero imported 1-3 PubMed articles for each ISSN I tried, which is probably why I confused importing a journal with an article. In any case, the import 'wand' says to enter DOI, ISBN or PMed so I should have realized. I can barely read cyrillic and have just been trying to import from the links given to me. We have GARF, Fond and Opis numbers for some of our references but I'm not sure if they are available through elibrary.