Error with Syncing Report ID 1485905285

jenscott

Report ID 1485905285

Hi,

It is giving me this error message when I try to sync. "The name ‘123 , 858 – 864 . DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-1376 . Co…’ is too long to sync.
Search for the item with this name and shorten it. Note that the item may be in the trash or in a group library."

I have searched and can't find the item mentioned and am not sure what to do.

Help?

Thank you!

adamsmith

Note that this would be among the authors and make sure your Zotero trash is empty

jenscott

Thank you for your response. What do you mean by "among the authors"?

Also, where is the Zotero trash? I didn't know there was such a folder, where do I find it?

Thank you.

adamsmith

Zotero trash is at the bottom of the left Zotero pane.

"among the authors" means that the string that's too long is literally in a field that should be a name, i.e. one of the authors/contributors -- which is why this breaks sync: names are only supposed to be so long.

jenscott

I found the trash and emptied it, thank you.

I still am having trouble locating the file - it is not among the authors. Are there other ways of searching that I'm missing?

adamsmith

are you still getting the sync error?

jenscott

Yes, it's driving me nuts. I can't get it to sync at all and I need to transfer the library on this computer to another computer.

adamsmith

how are you searching for the name?

jenscott

I have tried a number of things, first I just copied
123 , 858 – 864 . DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-1376 . Co…
into the search box. Then i've searched for just pieces of that. Then I tried advanced search for creators and all kinds of fields for the whole thing or pieces of it. Then I've scanned the creators field for names that seemed long or inappropriate.

adamsmith

Do you have any groups? Note that any search would only ever be in one library.
Also, note that you should be at the highest level of the library when you search (i.e. have the brown "box" with "My Library" or the group's name selected.)

The error message is pretty much always correct, so the item in question should be there.
Also note that every group has a separate trash.

jenscott

Thank you! I thought that was the key as I didn't know about the group library trash, but I'm still getting the sync error...

I emptied all the group library trash and searched the group library. I found one article that had a DOI number that matched the info in the error message (though none of the fields seemed overlong) and deleted that. I also deleted all the trash in all of my group libraries both online and remotely.

Now it takes a bit longer and asks me to resolve a number of inconsistencies but then stops and won't fully sync, giving me the same error.

Please help!

adamsmith

Could we get a new error ID for a failed sync as well as a debug ID?

jenscott

Report ID 1553906760

Is that all you need or something else?

adamsmith

sorry, I forgot the link for debug. Also this:
https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output

jenscott

Oh, okay, I didn't know about that. I followed the instructions.

The Debug ID is D1957944391

dstillman

Just search for "10.1542/peds.2008" in the root of your A.R. group library. I think there are a few items with this invalid name.

adamsmith

if you do find the item -- if there's something in the URL field, could you post it here? I'm wondering how this got into the name field in the first place

jenscott

When I search for that in the search bar at the top of the Zotero app a number of items (about 25) come up. It is not clear from the information displayed that any of them have the name that is causing the error. I can't see it mentioned in any field visible to me. Does that mean all of the articles are bad? Or should I look at a specific field somewhere?

Will look for the url as soon as I deifier where this article is.

Thank you!

adamsmith

My guess would be -- Zotero hides authors after the 10th one by default. So for every item in the search, check if it says "And more..." below the last author. If so, click on an author as if to edit it. That will open the list of all authors and you can scroll through that. Most typically, though not always, "bad" author entries are at the end.

Alternatively, now that you know in which group to search, you can search by creator for the same string in an advanced search (you can select the group to use in an advanced search at the top).

jenscott

Okay I think I have found it. That finally worked. It actually wasn't one of the ones with more than 10 authors, just a random one with 4 authors and the bad one at the end. There were 2 copies of it. The url for both is:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2214.2009.00987_5.x/abstract

and the title is:
Pediatric primary care to help prevent child maltreatment: the Safe Environment for Every Kid (SEEK) model

Thank you for your help.

adamsmith

thanks -- second time we're seeing this from Wiley (their metadata are bad). I've reported this to them, but they've never gotten back to me. We might look into trying to cleaning this up after all, but it's messy.

jenscott

Interesting. Good luck with that. Thank you again for all of your help, that was very frustrating.

DWL-SDCA

In this case, the Wiley-Blackwell article (in Child: Care, Health and Development and
'authored' by R. Reading) is really a reprint of an article that appeared in the journal Pediatrics. All "articles" by Richard Reading that appear in several Wiley-Blackwell journals are not really articles at all but reprints of selected contemporary items from other journals -- some with RR's comments. The old Blackwell problems with garbled RIS and other citation formats were just carried over to Wiley. There is more background to this but this probably isn't the right place for that.

All this notwithstanding, with very few exceptions I believe that citations to RR's things (he does have a few 'real' research articles and editorials) should instead be to the original authors and journal. This is especially so because in many cases the reproductions are far from exactly what was in the original.

adamsmith

I'm pretty sure that's a misunderstanding; Child has a current literature section of which this is part. This has the abstract of the paper in the original followed by a short commentary by Reading (starting with "This paper warrants careful reading because it reports striking and stark findings..."). Such abstract or literature summaries are not uncommon, depending on the discipline (they're e.g. a big deal in Math).
If you want to cite the short commentary, you should most certainly cite this with Reading as the author. If you want to cite the referenced paper, of course, you should be citing that.

But just to be clear, the metadata problem is entirely technical and has nothing to do with what should be cited: there are RIS fragments in the abstract field of the RIS that lead to garbage being imported into the author field.

DWL-SDCA

@adamsmith Years ago I was in touch with the abstracting and indexing folks at Wiley -- this was just after the Blackwell purchase -- to negotiate a metadata sharing agreement and to revisit the agreement that was with Blackwell. We discussed the metadata problems and the Wiley folks said that they were aware of and were frustrated by the mess. I was told that Wiley looked at the metadata and determined that the formatting problems are inconsistently inconsistent and that repair would need to be done by hand. They said that hand work would be too costly. At the time they considered buying metadata from ISI for some of their newly acquired journals. The last time we spoke they indicated that what's done is done. Alas, I'm finding author name and article metadata problems with recent publications.