Unable to download PDFs from EBSCOHOST

PeterSmith · July 15, 2014

I realise that there are a few similar threads, but my issue didn't seem to quite fit with them.

On EBSCOHOST, I do a search for JN "Academy of Management Learning & Education"

It brings up 788 articles in groups of 50.

Scenario 1: Chrome and Standalone Zotero
Clicking on the "Save to Zotero" in the address bar, downloads all the citations on the screen. Zotero also tries to download the PDFs, but fails (for some wholly unclear reason).

Scenario 2: Firefox and Standalone Zotero
The same thing happens

Scenario 2: Firefox and Zotero (in Firefox)
This works correctly, all the citations and PDFs are downloaded.

Curious :)

adamsmith · July 15, 2014

if you're accessing EBSCO through a proxy that's a known issue. Using Proxy and a connector won't fetch PDFs for databases that store PDFs under a different domain name.

PeterSmith · July 15, 2014

Let me see if I have this right. For all three scenarios I was accessing EBSCO through our ezproxy.

You're saying it failed because of a problem with connectors--i.e., when using Zotero standalone--and worked because a connector is not used with the native Firefox version of Zotero.

adamsmith · July 15, 2014

basically, yes. It's not so much a problem with the connectors per se, but an issue with setting cookies (used to authenticate you for getting the PDF) across different domains, which browsers restrict for security reasons.
Zotero will need to work around this and it looks like a patch that will work for this is reasonably close to being accepted, but no guarantees on timing. https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/409