live google scholar "cited by" count field

erleellis

A killer app for Zotero would be a "number of citations" field that shows the total number of citations of each entry in your library, as determined using Google Scholar. I am guessing that it would be too hard to make this a real-time process (updating whenever an article is cited anew), but there could be either a daily or on demand (a button?) search to update the number of citations per article?

This would really be fantastic- as I've now got about 5000 articles in my library, it would be so helpful to be able to sort by number of citations per article, after searching by tags. etc.

Is this kind of feature likely to be implemented in Zotero? Anyone else interested in this idea?

Note that I'm just getting started with Zotero and am tremendously excited by the possibilites! (I've used Endnote since 1996).

adamsmith

I think this may be fun (and maybe useful) for some people and seems ideally suited for a plugin - I'd keep it out of Zotero itself, though, which is already doing _a lot_ of things.

Bionatsci

+1 for this as a plugin (I often check the number of citations when doing a literature search - gives me some idea as to the relative importance of the articles. It would be nice to be able to do this in my Zotero library as well).

I agree with adamsmith that this isn't really core functionality for Zotero itself though.

erleellis

I do hope that someone will develop this plugin (what is the difference, as long as it works!)- I'm still on the fence about entirely switching over to Zotero. This functionality would be reason enough.

shantanu.ozarkar

I just stumbled on this one: Zotero Scholar Citations 1.0
by Anton Beloglazov, at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14667/

I am still testing it, though seems to be working fine. It is not LIVE feed, but stores the cited by number in call number field. I am happy with this version for now!

apple

+1 for this functionality. In the mean time I will try out the ZSC 1.0 plugin suggested above.

apple

Tried the plugin. Worked like a charm. Really great.

Except...

When I did it on my whole database (1000s of entries) I think google scholar interpreted me as a bot and started blocking me. Got a captcha page the next time I manually used google scholar.

Also every time I changed an entry in zotero the plugin would try to update the citation field (good) but my new status as a non-human in google's eyes results in an error "some of the requests to google scholar failed. probably due to a large number of requests."

So I uninstalled the plugin to avoid having those warnings pop up four times every time I updated an entry.

So close!

-A

beloglazov

Thank you for your comments!

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to avoid this anti-bot blocking. Only one possible way is just don't update a lot of entries at once. However, even if you are blocked, most probably you will be unblocked on the next day.

apple

Thanks. I will reinstall and be more careful...

do we know how many updates can be made before Google gets suspicious?

apple

For the record, a conversation in the dev forum exists on this plugin:

http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev/browse_thread/thread/f0a1bc7c2dea9dc2

shantanu.ozarkar

FF 3.6 is out and ZSC 1.0 does not work in it, so waiting for update!

shantanu.ozarkar

this will look exactly like the post before, but ZSC is now disabled in FF4.... I am using ZSC to see the trends in Molecular Anthropology publications and i have found it very useful. So waiting for the upgrade....