ISBN lookup not working, report ID 1744691759

pjbehringer
Hello,

I am actually having two problems. First, my identifier lookup function is not working (it just sits there searching forever).

Second, all the PDFs that I had previously saved have migrated somewhere else, so when I try to open them in Zotero, it says it can't locate the file. Is there an easy way to move the PDFs back? This seems perhaps related to the problem that Firefox no longer saves books or pdfs to my standalone library. Should I/can I just uninstall and reinstall without any problems?
  • adamsmith
    The second issue is
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sharing_data_directory

    Could you post a sample ISBN for the first issue?
    Does the problem extend to other IDs, e.g. a DOI such as 10.2105/AJPH.2009.160184
  • pjbehringer
    Here's the ISBN: 9780230552029

    And the problem does extend to other IDs like the one you suggested.
  • pjbehringer
    Thank you for your help. It looks like fixing the shared data directory problem cleared up the ISBN/DOI identifier issue. It's working now. Thank you!
  • leebel
    I could not see any other more relevant post re failure of ISBNs...

    I have no problems with DOI and many ISBNs but if anything doesn't look up, it will be an ISBN. I'm wondering therefore why I can easily find a publication using an ISBN on Google search but Zotero spins its wheels for about 15 seconds and then comes back with "Zotero could not find a record for the specified identifier. Please verify the identifier and try again."

    Zotero standalone 4.0.28.7 on Windows 10.

    Examples -

    ISBN 978-1-925238-17-4 National Innovation and Science Agenda (Hardcopy)
    ISBN 978-1-925238-18-1 National Innovation and Science Agenda (PDF)
    ISBN 978-1-925238-19-8 National Innovation and Science Agenda (HTML)
  • adamsmith
    Google doesn't help us. Zotero searches for ISBNs in (in this order)
    1. The Library of Congress
    2. The joint catalog of German libraries
    3. Worldcat

    The above (as is not uncommon for agency reports/publications), isn't currently in any of these.
  • leebel
    Is there a way we can get Zotero to 'spread its wings' a little more? :)
  • adamsmith
    It's technicall possible, but it's "costly" since every ISBN lookup has to run through all of the translators before failing and we'd need a good catalog that'd make this worthwhile, i.e. one that a) has good-quality data and b) has a significant number of ISBNs that the above three catalogs don't have.

    Plain google search is not an option -- that doesn't actually have any citation data to import.
  • zuphilip
    Google finds your ISBN (hardcopy) only on the webpage of the report itself. Thus, I guess, it wouldn't help to add any other services, at least in this example case.
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