Cannot download pdf on IEEE or Science Direct

TongZhao
Long story short, zotero had been working for me to download IEEE Xplore pdf's at a click of the Chrome add-on button. But it's not working for around 2 weeks or more. I tried uninstall, reinstall, update, changing to Firefox, shutting down my firewall. None worked. Now zotero could download some pdf's from other websites, for example: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3b68/6f27966052625d8a0e6905d075caf80ff8ef.pdf

It works I guess since it has a direct .pdf format in the address? But when I click on the zotero connect add-on in a IEEE article pdf page the add-on doesn't turn into the Adobe PDF icon but just the the white and grey paper icon. For example:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8048116

The full pdf access is provided by my university, but I have it displaying on the browser. Zotero with its "translator" (not sure how it actually works, but my Zotero is up to date) seems unable to get access to the PDF files on IEEE or ScienceDirect. I haven't tried other article databases yet, but IEEE is my main concern.


Anyone have an idea what's wrong with my zotero? When I use Zotero on my Mac laptop it didn't work as well, saying "Troubleshooting Translator Errors".
  • bwiernik
    For IEEE, it is a known issue (due to some recent changes with how IEEE's website is set up) with downloading items from the PDF page like you link to. However, if you download from the main item abstract page, it will grab both the item metadata and the PDF:
    http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8048116/

    For ScienceDirect, can you post a URL that is giving you problems?
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