Generic DOI translator for BMC

Rintze

I'm getting the generic DOI translator for BMC articles like http://biotechnologyforbiofuels.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13068-015-0395-8, which fails to save.

adamsmith

ticket created: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/985
they completely changed their website (to a much nicer one, though).

Rintze

Thanks Adam!

DWL-SDCA

BMC has also improved the quality of their metadata and pays better attention to character encoding.

zuphilip

I am currently coding some new translator for BMC and need some second view for the metadata there. Let us look at the above mentioned article: 1) Has this journal any issues? 2) Has this journal any page numbers? 3) What is actually the 212 next to the volume number? I would answer: No. No. Document id, maybe best placed in issue (or pages). Do you agree?

noksagt

Agreed (though with the caveat that the volume number is likely required to make it a unique identifier within the journal).

Document IDs tend to be cited in lieu of pages (see also the various AIP journals such as App Phys Lett).

Rintze

Yes, in "Biotechnology for Biofuels 2015 8:212", the "8" seems to be the volume, and "212" the article number within the volume (page numbers in the PDFs seem to always start at 1). Strangely enough the "212" doesn't appear in the embedded metadata.

zuphilip

Thank you for your responses!

Okay, the volume number is no problem, the meaning just changed to the n-th year of the journal (e.g. Biotechnology for Biofuels is in its 8th year).

The document id (e.g. 212) is also missing in the RIS. Thus, I have to work more for that...;)

Rintze

Document ID is also absent from the "endnote" and "bibtex" export options (http://citation-needed.services.springer.com/v2/references/10.1186/s13068-015-0395-8?format=endnote&flavour=citation and http://citation-needed.services.springer.com/v2/references/10.1186/s13068-015-0395-8?format=bibtex&flavour=citation ). Seems like an issue on their end. Maybe ping Springer?

Rintze

Looks like support.api@springer.com is their contact email address.

zuphilip

Okay, the new translator for BMC is out now. Your translator should update automatically after some time or you can update your translator manually. Let us know about any errors here for the BMC translator.

(BTW we agreed now to save the article id in pages.)

DWL-SDCA

Approaching this from a different perspective, it is common for US government agencies to require PMIDs and PMCIDs in addition to DOIs. The same is true for manuscripts to some publishers. Almost all BioMed Central content is indexed on PubMed. Doesn't Zotero import those ID numbers into the extra field? Things imported from the BMC website won't include those IDs. By using The PubMed site for BMC publications and bringing that content into your system using the Zotero PubMed translator, you will not need to visit PubMed for the IDs after you captured the regular metadata from BMC. (I would normally test this instead of relying on memory but I'll be away from a computer for a few hours as I'm writing this while waiting for a meeting.)

Please understand. I'm not suggesting that there is anything wrong with Zotero continuously improving the BMC translator.

zuphilip

We could import the PMID if it would be somewhere on the BMC website or the metadata (RIS) they provide. However, the PMID seems not to be there. If you can bring Springer to include the PMID on their BMC website, then I could adapt the BMC translator.

adamsmith

(the PMID was on some of the old BMC sites, which is how we imported it. As far as I can tell, on the current site PMIDs are only given in the reference list, not for the actual article.)