[bug report] valid DOI with special characters cannot be resolved

I have added an old PDF article to my My Library via "New Item → Link to File..." and wanted to create the full bibliographic entry via "Create Parent Item..." from the DOI (because the metadata retrieved for the PDF is not correct).

The DOI for this article is somewhat unwieldy,
10.1002/1521-3951(200101)223:1<293::AID-PSSB293>3.0.CO;2-N
but it is valid and can be resolved at doi.org .

Zotero fails to retrieve the metadata for this DOI with the error message "Zotero could not find a record for the specified identifier. Please verify the identifier and try again". My suspicion is that the greater-than and less-than symbols (or the semicolon?) are not handled correctly for the look-up.

I hope I haven't overlooked any previous report of this issue and that it can be fixed. (And this is only a bug report, not a request for help. I know that I can create the item by other means and have done so.)
  • This appears to be a bug in the data registered with Crossref.

    Zotero makes a request for data with these content types:

    Accept: application/vnd.datacite.datacite+json, application/vnd.crossref.unixref+xml, application/vnd.citationstyles.csl+json

    If data isn't available for a given type, the site should move on to the next type.

    In this case, data.crossref.org is returning content-type: application/vnd.crossref.unixref+xml without any data (content-length: 0).

    If the first two types are omitted and just Accept: application/vnd.citationstyles.csl+json is passed, correct data is returned, and that's what it should be doing automatically.

    Unfortunately there's nothing we can do to fix this on our end. You'd have to contact Wiley (I believe) and ask them to fix the data registered with Crossref.
  • (IIRC, these are an ancient set of DOIs with all sorts of problems -- this isn't just for the above call, btw.: search.crossref.org for that DOI also fails)
  • The REST API for this works fine though
Sign In or Register to comment.