bulk pdf retrieval for existing citations

rhaynes74

Hi folks, I am a new zotero user. Here is a scenario that happens frequently. I retrieve a bunch of citations from google scholar or other database. If I am on campus when I do this most of the pdfs are automatically downloaded. But if I am off campus many of the pdfs are missing. In the latter case when I get back on campus I would like to select the offending citations and then have zotero attempt to automatically download the pdfs. Is this possible ? Am I missing the feature ?

bwiernik

Code for this feature is written and awaiting final review to be incorporated (https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/948), but no specific ETA for when that will happen.

In your general workflow, though, you should set up Zotero's auto-proxy system to automatically redirect databases to go through your university's network and give you access to the library resources even when off-campus: https://www.zotero.org/support/connector_preferences#proxies_preferences

rhaynes74

Thanks this will be a nice addition! It looks like it has been left in its current state for over a year though.

I have been playing around with proxies - if I access google scholar/web of science from my library webpage, chrome / zotero connector asks me if I want to add a proxy. I did this but now the save to zotero button either doesn't work or is very very slow. I tell chrome to forget the proxy it added and then it works again quickly... any suggestions?

bwiernik

First, you would generally want click through to the journal webpage and import item from there, rather than from the google scholar search results page, as the item data will be much better. Further, the only PDFs that will be shown and retrieved from Google Scholar will be freely available PDFs (e.g., from OSF or ResearchGate or author webpages), regardless of whether your university has access to it. You would run the proxy on the journal page, rather than on Google Scholar.

Web of Science also doesn't host PDFs, so you would never be able to get them from importing from there. There again, your best option for importing the item and PDF are to click the "Full Text from Publisher" or "Find It" links and then import from the journal webpage it takes you to. Here again, you would want to run the proxy on the page that actually has the PDFs, rather than on Web of Science itself.

Regarding the pull request, it came amidst the final push to release the major updates for Zotero 5.0, which prevented the Zotero developers from giving it much attention at the time. Dan has stated that he is hoping to merge that code in the relatively near future.

yv-te-zoro

See details about the addition of this feature here: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/commit/679a6d5cc7e6c87931ea3b484332dda168ad5b5d