Upgrade StorageRe-fetching an existing item
Hi,
I would like to see a button to update (re-fetch) from PMID or doi to get the last up-to-date information.
The problem is generally occuring because I bookmark a lot of article "In press", which doesn't have a volume:no. If I cited them, I can't, a couple of months later, update easily my word document. I have to create a new item, so the link is lost between Zotero and Word. Furthermore, I have now in my librairy many "orphan" citations which I can use as-it, which if I need them, I will have to re-do all the process to re-save them, this time with a volume:no.
This feature exist in Mendeley.
Thanks
Mel
I would like to see a button to update (re-fetch) from PMID or doi to get the last up-to-date information.
The problem is generally occuring because I bookmark a lot of article "In press", which doesn't have a volume:no. If I cited them, I can't, a couple of months later, update easily my word document. I have to create a new item, so the link is lost between Zotero and Word. Furthermore, I have now in my librairy many "orphan" citations which I can use as-it, which if I need them, I will have to re-do all the process to re-save them, this time with a volume:no.
This feature exist in Mendeley.
Thanks
Mel
But note that you can just update the volume and issue numbers manually in Zotero in the meantime to avoid creating orphans and duplicates. You can click on the DOI label in the info tab to go to the page, then just type in the missing information-- that should take less time than creating a new item and fixing the citation.
I'm somebody who switched to Zotero for the promise of a single library synchronized across multiple PCs. I'd used other citation managers previously, and did not want to lose my library. So after importing a bunch of references from a different citation manager, I noticed some persistent errors. Page numbers were wrong (for some reason a lot were written as last, first instead of first-last), journal names were capitalized differently, extra words were added to the journal titles for some articles, abbreviations used for others, etc. Lots of sloppiness. Not to mention missing entries in the Journal Abbreviation field. So needless to say, when I tried to actually create a bibliography it was a mess.
I've also noticed occasional formatting inconsistencies with Zotero's translators. Usually these are small things, like page numbers being first -last (with a space) instead of first-last (no space), or differences with journal name or missing abbreviations depending on where I am when I choose to add the article (PubMed vs. Google Scholar vs. ScienceDirect, etc.).
While these are essentially bugs in other software or small problems in the translators themselves, their effective damage to the Zotero library can be quite persistent. If I could click a button and magically fix these problems, I would be thrilled.
My solution so far is the one suggested by ajlyon: I go in and hand-correct every broken reference. I've found well over 100 "broken" items in my library, so fixing them has provided hours of productive procrastination. Should somebody less stubborn than me make a bibliography and find it riddled with small errors, though, they may just conclude that Zotero stinks and give up on it entirely.
Fixing the translators is great for the next guy who tries to import an article, but in my case I didn't notice the errors for a number of months. I'd imagine that happens quite often, so a tool or plugin to fix existing errors in a library would surely be helpful for a lot of users.
My two cents on the subject is that I would be 95% as happy with the ability to overwrite one record with another, or to reassign the pointer of one record to another. So, if I have an existing record and download a new version of it, I could tell zotero to reassign the pointer for the existing record to the new record (and then transfer my notes, pdfs, etc, manually). I imagine this approach would be a lot easier to implement, not mention more robust. I worry about creating a feature that just grabs whatever the DOI currently links to--I find in a lot of cases that I'm better off downloading a citation from one database or another, or directly from the journal web page because those may be more complete than what comes up off the DOI. So in those cases, a DOI based refetch would be less useful, and in some cases, actually dangerous.
Another approach (that may be completely impractical) would be for zotero to (somehow, and I don't know enough to know how) remember where the citation came from, and then refetch from that page when requested.
1. I often download citations for article "in press" or "online first" and would like to be able to right click later on and fetch the complete citation once it is published (this would include downloading the PDF attachment if I have access to the journal or another online source exists).
2. Citations downloaded from some online sources are incomplete, but once they are downloaded it would be nice to be able to right click on the citation and have it updated from other more complete sources (plus fetch the doi and PDF as above).
I like the Mendeley solution very much, ther you just have a little update icon nextto the DOI and PMID field.
http://www.zotero.org/support/requested_features#zotero_interface
If you come from another lit. management software as I do, you can't really do without this feature. A simple update button next to the doi etc. would do the job. Additionally, right-click on multiple items of your database with the same "update from doi" would be very helpful to manage large databases and keep them up to date.