Zotero saves Editorial Summary instead of Abstract for Nature

I am using zotero 5.0.89 with firefox 79.0. When grabbing references from Nature website, zotero will save the content of editorial summary into the 'abstract' field. Example:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03352

Anyone knows a solution? Thanks so much!

  • edited August 20, 2020
    This "editorial summary" is what Nature provides in the webpage embedded metadata and in the RIS citation export for this older article. Although the author abstract is on the webpage (and, thus, theoretically available to a redesigned Zotero translator/scraper) the author abstract itself (not the editorial summary) is often what is downloaded to Zotero for more recently-published articles.

    For Nature articles I check to see which summary has been imported and copy/past the other one thereby keeping both versions.
  • Thanks so much for your reply. Since I have many Nature papers already in Zotero, I would like to batch process the 'abstract' field of all these papers to the true author abstract instead of checking each item by hand.

    One solution I am thinking of is to use the DOI of each paper to find the corresponding item in Pubmed and then add the corresponding item from Pubmed into Zotero, which would have the correct 'Abstract' field.

    Sounds pretty straightforward to implement, but I have no experience in Zotero scripting though. Could anyone provide some hints about how to do so?

    Thanks!
  • edited August 20, 2020
    PubMed does not necessarily have the author abstract -- especially for older articles. The metadata that PubMed gets from the publisher will have the same summary version that Zotero imports.

    You might be able to double-click on the article line in your Zotero collection and go to the article on the Nature website. There you can grab the summary/abstract you need -- a quick and easy maneuver I do many times a day.

    No scripting involved on your end. My comment was to say that theoretically it might be possible to capture the abstract by significant changes to the translator. However, as Nature is inconsistent about which "summary" is in their metadata, any translator changes might not be especially useful.
  • As far as I have checked, Pubmed did a good job about the abstracts of nature papers. So what I want now is simply a way to add a list of items (with known DOI) from Pubmed by script.

    Does Zotero provides an API to add items from Pubmed using DOI? I guess it has such function but couldn't find the corresponding function name.
  • Does Zotero provides an API to add items from Pubmed using DOI? I guess it has such function but couldn't find the corresponding function name.
    no. If you want to script this, I think the way to go would be to put all nature articles in one collection, then use pyzotero to cycle through them, query pubmed via eutilz & DOI and get the abstract and then add it via pyzotero.
  • edited August 20, 2020
    I'm trying to help you to quickly achieve the outcome you desire. Although with the example you provided in your original post PubMed has the author abstract and not the editorial summary, in my own considerable experience the opposite is often the case with Nature articles as PubMed records. What you are asking for will not necessarily achieve your desired result.

    I urge you to try grabbing the summary version you want from the Nature site. You will see that this can be accomplished very quickly and accurately. Even if you have several hundred Nature articles this shouldn't take a long time -- you should be able to whoosh through 7 or 8 articles a minute unless your internet connection is quite slow.

    My sincere apologies if my suggestion is more annoying than helpful.
  • @DWL-SDCA Thanks so much for your help and explanation!

    I was not annoyed at all. I see your points and agree that your way may be the faster route to the final results!
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