DOI translator wrongly preferred to website snapshot

bradrn

I was trying to use Zotero Connector on Firefox to save https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25241839 to Zotero. However, when I attempted to do this, Zotero instead saved https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0959683620972775. I eventually realised that the original page contained a comment linking to the latter article, causing Zotero Connector to mistakenly use the DOI translator rather than saving the website itself as desired. Is there any way to get Zotero Connector to prefer the website translator to the DOI translator in such cases?

(For context, I have accumulated several hundred pages from https://news.ycombinator.com and others, and am using Zotero in an attempt to organise and manage them. At the moment it is working excellently for this purpose, but given that I have very many pages to work through, I feel it could be frustrating if Zotero Connector were to occasionally prefer random undesired pages over the desired one, as happened for the URL above.)

I am using Zotero Connector version 5.0.78 with Zotero 5.0.95.

dstillman

However, when I attempted to do this, Zotero instead saved https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0959683620972775.

No it didn't — it showed you a popup with that item as an option. It wouldn't save it unless you selected it and clicked OK.

On a page where only DOIs are found and nothing else, you'll see the folder icon, and if you hover over it you'll see "Save to Zotero (DOI)". Since DOIs don't always refer to the current page, that will always show the folder icon and the Select Items dialog, to let you confirm what you want to save.

If the DOI isn't for the current page and you want to save a webpage item instead, right-click on the save button and choose one of the "Web Page" options.

dstillman

And it's not "wrongly preferred" or doing this "mistakenly" — this is done by design, because if the DOI does match the page, it'll result in vastly better metadata. The point of the icon and tooltip is to show you in advance what's available on a given page. On HN, you should know that you'll never want the DOI translator and should right-click instead.

bradrn

No it didn't — it showed you a popup with that item as an option. It wouldn't save it unless you selected it and clicked OK. … If the DOI isn't for the current page and you want to save a webpage item instead, right-click on the save button and choose one of the "Web Page" options.

Yes, this is true. And indeed, if I were saving only one webpage at a time, doing this would be absolutely fine as a solution. However, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I have several hundred webpages which I want to save, with no way of knowing which one(s) will trigger the DOI translator; going through this process for each and every one of those pages could take a lot of time. I’m simply asking if, for these sorts of ‘false positive’ pages, there is some way to make Zotero use the “Web Page” option as the default rather than the DOI translator. (Hmm, might there be a ‘blacklist’ option or something similar, so I can disable specific translators with specific domains?)

And it's not "wrongly preferred" or doing this "mistakenly" — this is done by design, because if the DOI does match the page, it'll result in vastly better metadata.

I do understand this. (Indeed, I’ve already had a couple of pages where the DOI translator has recognised a DOI correctly, and it has worked extremely well for those!) It only becomes a problem when it recognises a DOI I’m uninterested in and has no connection to the page itself.

dstillman

However, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I have several hundred webpages which I want to save, with no way of knowing which one(s) will trigger the DOI translator

I mean, you absolutely know — again, that's the whole point of the icon. If you see the folder icon on HN, it's the DOI translator and you should right-click instead. It takes literally an extra second or two, if and only if you see the folder icon.

There's no way to override this, sorry.

how do you do formatting — italics and quotes and suchlike — in these posts?

It's HTML, so <blockquote>.

bradrn

I mean, you absolutely know — again, that's the whole point of the icon. If you see the folder icon on HN, it's the DOI translator and you should right-click instead. It takes literally an extra second or two, if and only if you see the folder icon.

Good point, thanks for reminding me about that! I guess I’ll just have to do what you suggest then.