Citation capture from Google Scholar Results Page Fails - Error message

MarkLib

In gathering citations from results in Google Scholar I suddenly started to get the Zotero box that says it can't download the citation, and to check the Translator issues page on the Zotero website. I went through all the troubleshooting instructions, but this did not resolve the problem. The strange thing was that I started getting this message after I has already collected several other citations from GS. Why would Zotero start doing this all of a sudden? I've talked to other colleagues, and they have experienced the same issue in the past couple of days, and it's happening with both Firefox and Chrome. Did something change in Firefox, Zotero, or GS recently?

Any thoughts?

adamsmith

Works for me. What happens when you click on "Cite" then "Bibtex" under one of the search results in GS?

And how many citations are we talking? If you do massive imports from GS in a short period of time, it will likely shut you down to prevent automated harvesting of their data.

MarkLib

When I click on Cite, and then Bibtex for a reference, I get a GS popup asking me to confirm that I'm not a robot. Once I click through this, I get lines of what perhaps is Bibtex code for the reference.

I am gathering quite a few citations from GS for a bibliometric citation analysis project, and perhaps that is what caused the GS shutout? If that's it, how can I tell GS not to block me?

MarkLib

Why would GS block people from simply grabbing citations with Zotero?

adamsmith

Many people who have used GS for bibliometrics have found that it's just not feasible, as it will lock you out quite quickly on rapid access. That would apply to Zotero as well as any other scripted method, but likely even to very rapid download/use manually.
I wish I could tell you something more helpful, but there's really nothing Zotero or you can do about this.

As to why, you'd have to ask GS but it's a mix of legitimate concerns regarding the agreements they had to sign with publishers to get full text access as well as less benign explanations about them wanting to keep their data close at hand.

MarkLib

Thanks very much, as this helps tremendously just to know what's going on.

Is there a way to stop Zotero from gathering PDF attachments, and if so, do you think this would help prevent GS blocking?

adamsmith

Yes there is (it's a preference in the general tab of the preferences) and no, it unfortunately would almost certainly not help, since the PDFs aren't actually stored by google so they probably don't mind you following those links.

adamsmith

It would speed things up on the Zotero side as long as it's working, though, so if you don't need the PDFs it's still probably worth disabling.

MarkLib

Ok. Thanks very much again for your help and information!