Safe to close tab before translator notification window disappears?

Rintze

I always wonder: is it okay to close a tab as soon as I've clicked the Save to Zotero button in my browser? Or can this mess up the save and should I wait until the translator notification window disappears?

I often first open a bunch of tabs with individual papers, and then go through them one-by-one to decide which ones to save to Zotero. If I didn't have to wait until the notification windows disappears for each tab I'm saving, it would speed up my workflow quite a bit.

DWL-SDCA

I have done careful testing of this on a Mac with Firefox. For most but not all publisher and database sites when downloading a single item the save is complete as soon as the notification window is populated. I've had some problems with Open Journal Systems sites if I try to move too quickly. (OJS also tend to provide incomplete metadata so that isn't a really bad thing as I need to hand enter missing items.)

I tend to have incomplete downloads when I select multiple items for download and all items haven't finished. Closing the tab seems to stop the download process. Because I find that almost everything I import requires some hand-editing (modify casing of the title, fix the language field, etc.) and it is best to have the publication open when I'm doing the editing; I've seldom used the multi-item download function lately.

I've consistently had better luck with this when working with Firefox instead of Chrome even though Chrome seems to be faster when on publishers' sites waiting for pages to finish loading.

I mostly use Zotero as a MODS translator. It has been over a year since I've used Zotero to assist with manuscript-writing. -- I download several hundreds of items each day, then edit them, export in MODS format, and import them into SafetyLit. We follow 4000+ journals issue-by-issue so it is in my interest to efficiently import things to Zotero.

adomasven

You can close the tab as soon as the progress window lists the name of the item (or all of the selected items, if saving multiple items from a page). From that point on the rest of the work is done by the Zotero client and the progress window indicators are only cosmetic. Do note that you won't be notified if Zotero ends up failing to save attachments.

Rintze

Thanks both.

And for attachments, I should generally be safe to close the tab once the attachment name shows up in grey in the progress window? It's fine if I miss the notification of a failed attachment save.

adomasven

You don't event have to wait for attachment names to show up. The Connector sends the initial query to Zotero with all information for the item and its attachments first. Since preferences in Zotero on what kinds of attachments should be saved can affect the number of the attachments to display (e.g. snapshot saving disabled means there shouldn't be a line for a snapshot), they only show up in the progress window after Zotero responds to the Connector.