Cannot import EBSCOHost ERIC search results in Chrome

Neither me nor my colleagues (using different operating systems) can import search results from EBSCOHost searches of ERIC. When we are viewing a list of search results, we can click on the button for the Zotero Chome plugin and it then gives us a list of items that we can import. But when we try to import them we get the "An error occurred while saving this item. See Troubleshooting Translator Issues for more information." error message.

We have no problem importing individual search results once we click on them one-at-a-time.

The report ID I just submitted is 625520054. Please let me know what additional information you need from me to troubleshoot and resolve this issue. Thanks!
  • We've had some reports of large imports getting restricted by EBSCO. Could you try importing just 2-3 search results at once?
  • Adam, that might be it. It does appear to work fine when I select a subset of one page of search results. So I far I've tested up to 18 results and Zotero batch downloads them fine. There is a small delay of 2-3 seconds and the delay seems to increase with the number of items I download at one time so it does seem feasible that something just times out when I select an entire page of search results with 50 items. I have no way of determining if this is a purely technical issue (i.e., there are inefficiencies in the entire process that simply don't scale well) or if EBSCO is intentionally slowing things down to try to prevent someone from mass downloading large numbers of items (which I am kind of trying to do right now as I'm in the very beginning stages of a literature review!).

    This is annoying but now that we know what's going on we can work around it. Thanks for quick and helpful response!
  • almost certainly EBSCO doing this on purpose. We´re seeing similar things with many vendors. It's quite annoying (given that our institutions are paying them tons of money already for the service).

    If this is becoming too inconvenient and you don't need attached PDFs, you can add all items to en EBSCO folder, then export that to RIS and import into Zotero. We do some cleaning of the RIS on import, but it's typically pretty decent on EBSCO and definitely for ERIC. But again, no file attachments that way.
  • edited November 10, 2018
    "... tons of money ..." is an undercount. My university's EBSCO subscription is more than US$1.3 million a year. That subscription omits many of the available EBSCO databases. Subscription cost is based on the number of users and the selection of databases. There are other databases each with its own subscription cost.

    The total database subscription cost is about US$4 million per year. Many universities pay more than 2X that amount.
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