[Springer] useing "First online" instead of real publication date

cb102

An example
<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-013-0221-z>;

The publication date in the specific journal issue is April 2014. This would be the correct date should be used for citations and references in own papers.

But ZoteroAddOn (with Firefox) use "First online: 30 November 2013" as date when importing it.

adamsmith

Yes, we should (and in the case of Springer - can) fix this.

cb102

btw: Sometimes Springer showed me a "new" Website-Design and asked for feedback. But I wasn't able to reproduce and test it.
So this report here is about the "old" design. Maybe this will change in the next time.

btw2: I was title-screening all issues of this journal. After some issues the import itself stoped. I was able to select multiple publications and click "ok" - nothing happens, no error. Only firefox CPU% was high. After restarting Firefox everything went fine.
I will monitor that for other journals, too and open a own report if I can reproduce this.

DWL-SDCA

SpringerLink seems to be testing several versions of their web display. (Too bad that we cannot opt-out) Yesterday I encountered 3 different display versions when browsing abstracts from a single journal issue. At least one of the versions had no embedded metadata. The main differences were the positions of the ads and the article information boxes and the number of "columns" in the display.

My feedback was that I didn't really have a preference for the appearance but I want a site that allows efficient downloading of rich metadata, the correct print-date, and pdf.

adamsmith

just to be clear: springer is doing the right thing wrt metadata and have probably the richest and highest quality of header metadata of any publisher.
They're just the only ones (I believe) to have both those dates up and we haven't adjusted yet.
Here's how this looks:
<meta name="citation_online_date" content="2013/11/30"/>
<meta name="citation_cover_date" content="2014/04/01"/>

DWL-SDCA

Yes, Springer's embedded metadata has been superior. However, during this test, not only was the page appearance changed but the header metadata also was of different quality and completeness. The same article page, after a refresh, not only was displayed differently but had a different metadata format in the header. For the version with no embedded metadata the header called a script that should have brought in an external but didn't. The no metadata version did have a few GS/Highwire entries but they were empty.

cb102

Then this is the right time to report that to springer.

jessriedel

This issue still exists 5 months later. Should it be added to the list of known translator issues?

https://www.zotero.org/support/known_translator_issues

(I confirmed the issues still exists for the "Springer Link" translator on this article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1021669308832 with translators all updated running Zotero Standalone 4.0.29.5 on OSX 10.11.5).

nickbart

It gets worse: there are Springer articles that do have a "citation_cover_date" but no "citation_online_date", and for such articles Zotero does not save a date at all.
A timely fix would be greatly appreciated.

adamsmith

This is now fixed for all sites (though as of now, I'm only aware of Springer using cover_date)

jessriedel

Thanks adamsmitth, much appreciated.

mzefran

More complications with SpringerLink. When I access the catalog through my library proxy (when off-campus) my imports lack several fields, including date and incorrect book title. If I go to the public site, the imported article has much more information (ISBN, date, book title, etc.), but of course I don't get the PDF. Here are the links to the two versions of the article:

http://link.springer.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/chapter/10.1007/BFb0109667
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/BFb0109667

The first page does not include any "date" field in the metadata, the second has "citation_publication_date" instead. Also, the first page is the "new version" Springer uses, while the second is still the old version.

Would be great if the translator worked for both versions. Or better said, if Springer were consistent with their metadata on both versions of the page.

adamsmith

@mzefran -- don't have access to this, so can't check this on full access -- could you maybe take a screenshot of the "new page" format, upload it somewhere and link to it from here?

Also, which OS is this and which browser?

mzefran

Here is the link to a folder containing the screenshots of the old and new pages, as well as the html sources where the metadata is visible:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9va8i74pkcxcc7a/AAB5ky_oh6BhN4xvd14ELBS8a?dl=0

This is Chrome under Linux.

adamsmith

I see -- since they are asking for your opinion, do you mind sending them a message about this? It'd be very inconvenient for us to try to work around this and get the data elsewhere.

mzefran

I actually already wrote to them. Will update once I hear back.

adamsmith

thanks -- let us know if you hear back. If you haven't heard anything in a month, ping back here and let us know and we can see what we can do. It'd be helpful if there were an example of the new conference page that appears publicly (e.g. for the above I don't have access through my institution, so even with proxy it appears in the old format).

zuphilip

(@adamsmith: I have access to the above site, i.e. let me know when I can help here.)

adamsmith

@zuphilip If you could check out the quality of the RIS/bibtex export and how to get to it?

zuphilip

RIS/BibTeX have a date and they are accessible via the links
http://citation-needed.services.springer.com/v2/references/10.1007/BFb0109667?format=bibtex&flavour=citation
http://citation-needed.services.springer.com/v2/references/10.1007/BFb0109667?format=refman&flavour=citation

I will report to Springer that the metadata tags (HighWire) for the date are missing in this example.