Zotero fails at retrieving metadata for Jstor articles correctly

auster

Hi there,

Zotero commonly fails to get the publication year and the journals' volume, issue, and pages for many jstor files. Instead, it puts the current year as the year of publication and the total number of pages as page numbers. It leaves the volume and the number sections blank.

For instance, this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1209713?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents.

I contacted Jstor's support, and they told me I should contact Zotero's support.

adamsmith

What do you see when you're saving this? Does Zotero mention some sort of error in the saving pop-up? I saw some weirdness when I first loaded the page, but when Zotero saves this regularly, it saves it as volume 4, issue 4, 1950, 323-331, which is correct I think.

auster

If I save it from the browser, everything is alright:

van den Ecker, Louis. 1950. ‘A Veteran’s View of Hollywood Authenticity’. Hollywood Quarterly 4(4):323–31. doi: 10.2307/1209713.

Zotero does not show anything unusual while saving it.

If I download the file and save it to Zotero, then I get this:

Anon. 2021. ‘A Veteran’s View of Hollywood Authenticity’. HOLLYWOOD QUARTERLY 10.

adamsmith

Oh, that's probably to be expected. I don't think Zotero has specific code for parsing the JSTOR frontpage (though might be worthwhile considering?) and otherwise old, pre-DOI articles will tend to ingest poorly.

auster

Ah, I see.

Ok, I will be just saving the metadata via the browser and then adding the files.

Thank you very much!

adamsmith

The file should automatically attach when saving the metadata. Try downloading once & accepting terms if that doesn't work.

auster

Will do. Thanks for the suggestion to accept the terms once — that's exactly why I started saving Jsotr's files and not saving them from the browser.