Problems saving publication data to Zotero

blaz.miklavic
Hi,

all at the sudden I can't save publication data and .pdfs from the web.
I get messages like "An error occurred while saving this item. Try again, and if ..." when I have a webpage with a .pdf opened. Sometimes such problems occur also when I try to save metadata from the webpage of the paper (and not .pdf). But just sometimes - it has a fickle behaviour.
I have Chrome and Zotero updated and the pages are fully loaded when it happens. It happens with ScienceDirect, but it also happened with JSTOR when I tried to save publication info via metadata, but it worked when I used the "Save to Zotero (JSTOR)" option.
Here is the link from which I couldn't save the .pdf and the publication data:
https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0012825215300271/1-s2.0-S0012825215300271-main.pdf?_tid=b957a225-5978-4a72-890a-7d60dac0d640&acdnat=1546850980_233264f545e116ed260767890f75a355

I use MacOS sierra 10.12.6.

Thank you in advance!
B
  • dstillman
    That link redirects to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825215300271 — which is the article page — for me. But I assume that's meant to be a URL for the PDF itself? Can you save from the article page? In any case, if you're getting an error, we'd want to to see a Debug ID from the Zotero Connector for a save attempt that fails.

    But note that, when you have the option, you should save from the article page rather than the PDF itself. Zotero can often recognize metadata from the PDF itself, but the article page generally has all the metadata, and Zotero is optimized to save from that.
  • blaz.miklavic
    Thank you for your answer.
    On the article page I couldn't even get the option to Save with metadata, or whatever the option used to be before. I could just get 2 options to save the webpage (w/wo snapshot).

    Today it has been just acting fickle. I could download some .pdfs to Zotero (and automatically retrive the metadata), but some not. HEre is the duebug ID of one problematic .pdf: D400669889
  • dstillman
    edited January 21, 2019
    You should always try from the article page, so let's debug that instead. (Elsevier does various things to try to prevent automated downloads, and one of those protections is likely preventing the direct PDF link from working in the way that such URLs work on most other sites. We'll see what we can do about that.)

    If you're not seeing the ScienceDirect translator on the article page, can you provide a Debug ID from the Zotero Connector for loading the page and not getting that option?
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