HeinOnline Translator sometimes gets multiple dates

paulgowder
Hi there,

I've noticed a recurrent glitch in the HeinOnline translator that seems to happen particularly with law journals where there are volumes that span multiple years. Often, a particular issue within that year will actually show up as both years when the translator finishes with it, at least using the Chrome browser add-in. For example, say there's some journal with volume 10, where issue 1 is December 2010 and issue 2 is January 2011. If I fire off the Chrome button on an article in issue 2, I'll often end up with a Zotero record showing the date as "2010-2011."

I can't provide an example link, because I access Hein through my university's proxy server, but one article that I just grabbed via the translator where this glitch occurred is in Aya Gruber, "Garbage Pails and Puppy Dog Tails: Is That What Katz Is Made of," U.C. Davis Law Review 41(3): 781-838 (2008): the Zotero browser add-in for chrome reads the date as "2007-2008".

  • adamsmith
    A link would still be helpful -- we can abstract away the proxy information
  • paulgowder
    Right on---here is a link through my university's proxy to the paper indicated.

    https://heinonline-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/davlr41&div=24&id=&page=&collection=journals

    FYI, the other obnoxious thing about Hein is that you get a totally different page when you're originating from a server with access as opposed to without. It's not like JSTOR or Cambridge or something where you just get the same page but the PDF download link doesn't work. On Hein, the landing page that you see from outside a proxy server/university etc. login is a radically stripped down thing with none of the metadata. Here's the stripped-down link that I get through a browser that doesn't go through the proxy:

    https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/davlr41&div=24&id=&page=

    It occurs to me, comparing those two pages, that I have a hypothesis for what might be happening here. For some bizarre reason, at the top of both the non-logged-in landing page and the logged-in page, Hein gives a bad citation for this paper that doesn't take into account the journal issue number: "41 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 781 (2007-2008)". When you're logged in, the sidebar on the left shows the issue, and the specific date associated with that issue ("Issue 3 - February 2008"), but you really have to go hunting for it. If the date scraper is just grabbing that date from the top of the screen, that would explain the problem.
  • adamsmith
    No, we're not just scraping the date, we're using the metadata (RIS) from HeinOnline, which has 2007-2008:
    TY - JOUR
    A1 - Gruber, Aya
    T1 - Garbage Pails and Puppy Dog Tails: Is That What Katz Is Made of Symposium - Katz v. U.S.: 40 Years Later: Privacy, Policing Homosexuality, and Enforcing Social Norms
    JF - U.C. Davis Law Review
    JO - U.C. Davis L. Rev.
    DA - 2007-2008
    Y1 - 2007-2008
    VL - 41
    IS - 3
    SP - 781
    (etc.)

    This would be quite tricky to fix on our end. Could you try reporting to Hein (focusing on the RIS export under "Cite" -- it's always easier to report something that's clearly under their control than Zotero import, which they may not be as familiar with)
  • paulgowder
    Oh interesting. (Oddly, despite using Hein for years, I've never actually noticed that "cite" button before in their horrifically cluttered visual interface.)

    What's extra goofy is that the human-formatted citations inside that button are actually correct, it's just the machine-readable ones that are janky. (Looks like the bibtex one under "text file" is crap too.) Yuck.

    Yeah, this is definitely a Hein problem rather than a Zotero problem. Thanks for poking around at it... I think I'll have one of our librarians yell at them, they might listen to them :-)
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