"Retrieving Metadata" Process Seems Frozen

bliberatore
I'm in the process of moving my readings over to Zotero and, having surpassed the free 300MB of storage, have bought the 2G storage plan for now.

My trouble is that in trying to get the metadata for my articles, I'm met with the "Progress" window, with a list of articles to be processed, but the process never advances. It appears to get stuck on the first article in the list (regardless of what that article is), for which it displays the green arrows and the Item Name "Processing," with the status bar at the top completely empty.

Any suggestions for how I can fix this? Thanks, all.
  • dstillman
    Can you provide a Debug ID for an attempt that hangs?
  • stroom
    Same here, but only since now. Retrieving metadata does not pass anything but the message: Processing.
  • stroom
    Debug ID D1872713098
  • dstillman
    There's no activity in that debug output. Can you restart Zotero and try again, and provide another Debug ID from Zotero startup if it still doesn't work?
  • stroom
    D519467746
    This time it started the first item (to no avail) but got stuck in the 2nd
  • dstillman
    Sorry about that. Restart Zotero and it should be fixed now.
  • stroom
    It is. Thank you!
  • bkahler1
    Hi,
    I have encountered problems with Zotero hanging during processing import. I have submitted to debugging reports D1459216690 and
    D76890833.

    It has occurred when I tried importing two PDFs that I had downloaded from "Tremor and other hyperkinetic movements", called "Integration of Osteopathic Manual Treatments in Management of Cervical Dystonia with Tremor - A Case Series" and "Overuse Cervical Dystonia - A Case Report and Literature Review".

    To circumvent the error, I have to find the article hanging. Abandon the processing and move the article to trash, and then restart.

    Strangely, when I go to Pubmed and import it from there, it works.

    Was it only this one, it would not be a problem. But it is when I import a bunch of files and it occurs, I have to delete all the non processed articles and start over - making sure the problematic one is not among them.

    Any idea why this happens?

  • bkahler1
    Correction.
    I just tried importing the "Overuse" paper form Pubmed. It did not import the free pdf , only the PubMed entry.

    But when I go to the PMC page https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039947/ and press the Firefox "Save to Zotero", the import completes.

    This, could be different problems - one relating to interpreting/processing the PDF format (my inital problem) and the second one pertaining to the web process. But, I know too little of the inner mechanics of Zotero :-)

  • bkahler1
    In continuation of my problems above:

    After the failure has been encountered, and I have cancelled the hanging article and restarted Zotero, I would like it to continue processing the other PDF items imported.

    How can I do that, without removing these and reimporting them?
  • dstillman
    I can reproduce this. It seems to be triggered by an upstream error with the metadata provided for DataCite DOIs, but it obviously shouldn't cause a freeze in any case, so we'll fix that ASAP. Thanks for reporting.
    How can I do that, without removing these and reimporting them?
    Just select the other items, right-click, and choose "Retrieve Metadata for PDFs".
  • bkahler1
    Found it. Right-click on the PDF item and choose "Recreate Metadata for PDF.
  • bkahler1
    thanks a million!
  • dstillman
    @bkahler1: That PDF (and others that were freezing) should now work.
This discussion has been closed.