adamsmith:

It may not be productive to continue our dialog.

But if I understand the situation correctly, for six years Zotero stored the pubmed url automatically, a single user (approved by the lead), removed that feature, and now even a temporary rollback is "not viable". I think that you and I disagree on the meaning of the term "viable".

I do appreciate the other comments in the thread. Hopefully there will be a way to solve this issue soon.

I don't know how public the comments have been complaining about the PubMed database URL being used instead the correct URL for citation. However, using the PubMed URL required manually editing the manuscript to change to the proper citation form.

that exactly. And it makes absolutely no sense to revert back to a solution producing that type of import for all users.

That said, I do understand that and why some users want the linked PubMed article as part of their citation and I and others have suggested ways that we'll be able to do that in the future - I believe Dan in another thread suggested an additional field as a third option (apart from Simon's above and the PMID version I suggest), so it's not like we're ignoring that demand.

I've also offered to help with individualized workarounds which require in the vicinity of 5 lines of code, though obviously my enthusiasm for helping someone decreases with the amount of invective thrown at me...

While I understand the necessity of this change in order to adapt a "clean" database that corresponds to standards I completely fail to understand why an option to keep the old behavior was not added.

In terms of ease of use this change is all down hill. I frequently check the abstract of an item in Zotero to be sure I'm citing the correct paper, then if needed, I open the corresponding pdf file / go to the publishers page. Note that abstracts are often much easier to read on Pubmed (or other indexing pages) than on the publisher webpage.

Before I could simply double click the item in Zotero anywhere - now I'm left with having to click a small arrow follow by a double click. This has annoyed me for months and the first thing I did when the change went into effect was to check if there was a new option I missed...

I see above a comment about "this seems only to have affected 4 users" and that makes me sad. Those 4 users were the ones that spoke up for everyone else who do not frequent forums. Comments about: This is open source, you can fix it yourself - here, use this (soon to be) outdated translator are also not helpful and seem more arrogant than trying to actually solve the problem at hand: That usability of Zotero went down with this change for a lot of users.

I really really love the work done on Zotero and despite this change it is still the best reference manager out there, its just slightly more annoying to use now.

Zotero developer Dan Stillman showed some interest in using a new field instead of a link item, and changing the double-click behavior: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/26636/simplify-pubmed-translator/?Focus=140919#Comment_140919 (and down)

This won't be possible to implement in the short-term, though, because of current limitations in how syncing works.

Yes, I'm aware there is work being done on this and that hopefully it will be possible to get the original behavior back. My gripe (although I'm very thankful for Zotero and all the work being put into it! :-) is why it was considered perfectly ok to change the behavior silently instead of making it optional.

Thanks for continuing to work on this, getting the "feature" (or bug ;-) back as an option would be extremely welcome!

In terms of ease of use this change is all down hill. I frequently check the abstract of an item in Zotero to be sure I'm citing the correct paper, then if needed, I open the corresponding pdf file / go to the publishers page. Note that abstracts are often much easier to read on Pubmed (or other indexing pages) than on the publisher webpage.

I take it you do not find it convenient to read the abstract in Zotero itself if you find the need to go to PubMed to read it. I think that's an issue we would be interested in addressing. I think I find the abstract a bit crowded and not as convenient to get to as it could be. IMO if we introduced a frame on the bottom of the list that would immediately show the abstract for a selected item, it would be better. We can also use that frame to show a preview of a PDF at some point in the future (I think Simon wants to do this to some extent anyway)

I imagine that the frame would be collapsible, just like the tag panel. I typically use Zotero Standalone, so screen real estate is not an issue, but I can see how this could be a bit much in Firefox. Maybe a keyboard shortcut could collapse/minimize this frame.

I don't really like the info panel either - we should move this to a different thread, though.

What about the double-click behavior? That should be a very quick solution to some the issue hartvig complains about most.
Two separate issues:
1. If an item doesn't have a DOI or URL and it's only attachment is a link, currently double-clicking does nothing. It should open the link. This is IMHO a no-brainer.
2. On the order in which items are opened, I'd suggest attached links should take preference over resolved DOIs. This may be more controversial.

It seems that most of you don't use LaTeX/BibTeX, but FWIW, this change results in no "url" field in bibtex entries for pubmed abstracts, hence no url is generated by bibtex in the references list.

Please consider that this breaks the previous functionality and also uniformity, compared with pulling from almost every other source actually storing a url.

I don't mean to be rude, as I'm grateful for the functionality of Zotero, but I don't think the repercussions of this change were thoroughly considered before implementation. Why didn't you simply allow a preferences option for the functionality to change for those who wanted it the new way, and an option for it to remain the same for the rest of us?

Thanks for being responsive to all the different views out there.

My workflow is Zotero --> LyZ --> LyX --> HTML/PDF, which works surprisingly well, save that LyZ currently doesn't figure out the location of the URL as an attachment to pubmed entries. This is obviously not Zotero's responsibility, as LyZ is coded to be an add on to Zotero, not vice versa.

It's probly possible to recode LyZ a bit to make it work with this change, since in principle the information is there. It's beyond my expertise at the moment, however.