change the way of grabbing author names

rrohleder
Hi all,

I don't know, if it's possible and also if this discussion is in the right group, but I wonder while I use the automatic grabbing function to get metadata for PDFs that is using the google-scholar-search I think. Anyway I got always the names of the authors with abbreviation of the first name. So "Becker, J." instead of "Becker, Jürgen" or whatever...

So how am I able to change this, or do I need some other lookup-engine or is this a bug or what?

thanks for answers and suggestions!
  • adamsmith
    there's nothing to be done - google scholar only has initials for author names, but it's the only reliable way to get data with a simple text query. (Zotero does try to find a DOI first and the data from CrossRef has full first names)

    The best you can do to improve data quality is trying to avoid using the retrieve metadata feature. Data directly from databases or publishers is better in almost all cases.
  • rrohleder
    hi, ok, works for me.

    So how am I able to use other lookup-engines? I see inside the destination-folder and also inside the "Application-Support"-Folder, there are many of them that I would also love to use.

    I read the documentation, but there stands only that I have to go to a page and insert the engine into Zotero. But this won't work for the standalone version!!?! So any manual alternative (even more complicated) would be wonderful!
  • adamsmith
    edited April 27, 2012
    lookup engines aren't used for retrieving metadata, so if you're interested in improving that, it's not what you're looking for -
    try out one of the default ones to give you a sense of what they're doing - they're mainly helpful to take you to an item holding in your local university library, though I'm sure there are some other use cases.

    I have no idea what the "Application Support" and the "destination-folder" are - I don't think they have anything to do with Zotero, though maybe they're part of a standalone install on a Mac?

    I don't know how/whether it's possible to add locate engines for standalone, if you're still interested in this maybe someone else can help out. But in any case there are only a small handful of sites that have open resolvers that work with this.
  • rrohleder
    ok,

    for getting this clear to my mind: If I have an entry (e.g. paper) and I want to see, if those paper is available inside my university-library, or at amazon, or at springerlink.com than I have to install those specific lookup-engines?!

    'cause while retrieving metadata from a PDF e.g. I would always got an entry "library-catalog = Google Scholar" ... so it's little hard for me to differentiate there.

    I also have a look again inside those preference-folders. The file "engines.json" would give me, what I want here. But it's hard to write them on my own...
    so how do I download/add some non-default lookup-engines in the standalone version?
    Yes I'm using MacOS… :-)
  • adamsmith
    To be absolutely clear - if you just have the PDF in Zotero, the lookup engines will do absolutely nothing.
    They are only relevant if you already have citation data in Zotero and e.g. want to locate a book or a copy of a paper.

    Let me rephrase that:
    - Retrieve Metdata looks at a content of a PDF and adds metadata to it in Zotero.
    - Lookup engines look at metadata in Zotero and take you to a website corresponding to that metadata. They don't add anything in Zotero and they require metadata to already be present.

    The fact that you still mention the two together suggests to me you're still missing something here.

    Also, there really aren't many websites that have open search as required by Zotero - beyond the default three I only know of amazon.com, I don't think Springerlink is even an option. (For your library, you'd actually go a slightly different route through an OpenURL resolver - Zotero may be able to detect that automatically from the advanced tab of the preferences, else ask your library for the resolver URL.)
    IIRC you're running Firefox anyway, so you can install these through Firefox and they'll work in Standalone as well - but as I said, I wouldn't know of any other engine except amazon.com you could add.
  • rrohleder
    yes man, got it :-)

    just look a little bit on the process:
    you got some pdf -> you will import them to Zotero -> you will grab metadata as available, than you will create a literature entry out of this

    another story is: you read through the PDF, find some good citations/literature-suggestions from the bibliography, than you use a tool like FreeCite or ParsCit (works better with reimporting identified literature-entries for me!) -> you create an entry -> you want to know where to get this text/book/article from -> you will use a lookup-engine (I create some on my own for Springerlink, the library of the university of frankfurt and some article-webpages that allowed URL-Rewriting...) to get the text itself.

    So it seems, that we misunderstood each other, very sorry for this!

    maybe last question from my side to some developer of Zotero:
    is there a chance to change umlauts while using the lookup-engine; so that if I use {rft:title} it would change "ä"->"ae", "ö"->"oe" e.g. ?
    and what variables are available through rft? (feel free to send me a pm if you want...)

    regards!
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