saving full abstracts vs fragments of abstracts

I'm trying to save articles from Nature using the zotero connector with firefox (zotero, firefox, and zotero connector are all the up-to-date versions available for Ubuntu 18.04). I find that an error in connecting to nature publishing group is reported when I hit ctrl+shift+s, but then the article and pdf are successfully saved from 'embedded metadata'. Perhaps that is the source of the issue. In any case, all seemed well, until I inspected the entries created: the connector (I guess) appears to only grab a sentence or two of related text for the abstract. It is not the first sentence or two of the abstract in the pdf that is downloaded though. It's also not grammatically incorrect or anything like that, so I think it's grabbing an intentionally generated chunk of text somewhere; it's just that this text is not in fact the abstract for the article.

It seems this could be rectified somewhere in preferences, or perhaps by analyzing these PDFs and extracting their abstracts? Some way of fixing this issue in an automated fashion would be helpful, as I have many references at this point from this journal that have this problem.

Thanks for your help. Obviously if more details are needed I'd be happy to provide them.
  • Thanks for reporting. There's an open ticket for the Nature translator: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/2126
    Fixing that should fix the partial abstract (the partial abstract is what Zotero gets from the metadata that Nature has on the page itself in a standardized format. It's probably optimized for social media, hence the complete sentences)
  • I find that a similar problem exists with Oxford University Press journals. Only about 150 characters of the abstract are imported. Zotero seems to be capturing the abstract from the webpage header. I contacted the A&I folks at OUP and they replied that the truncated abstracts are intentional -- as @adamsmith suggested the OUP representative said that the header abstract is for search engines and social media.
  • Is there a ticket for the abstracts on OUP? If not, would you mind posting a couple of URLs? Since the abstract is typically on the page, we are almost always able to fix this with a line of custom code.
  • edited March 4, 2020
    10.1093/ageing/afy156

    10.1093/aje/kwy200

    10.1093/bjc/azy019

    Thank you. @adamsmith
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