PDF Issues

Carrie.Cousineau
Hello:

I am working in a Group Library and most of the articles we had saved in our collections were overwritten with the same PDF (which was actually one of the articles in our collection). For example, this article we added "RN-to-BSN Students' Quality Improvement Knowledge, Skills, Confidence, and Systems Thinking" had been overwritten with the PDF for "Psychometric Evaluation of the Clinical Skills Self-Efficacy Scale". We were working in two different collections with a total of 28 articles saved in the collections. Of the 28 articles, 15 had the PDFs changed to the Psychometric Evaluation article. Does anyone know why this would happen or how we could prevent it from happening again?

Thanks,
Carrie
  • dstillman
    They don't appear to have been overwritten. The items in question were all saved within 15 minutes of one another from EBSCO, and all have file modification times from the moment they were saved, suggesting that EBSCO simply served the same file for each download. You would've seen the wrong files if you had opened them immediately after saving.

    This could be some sort of session-related bug from EBSCO or your proxy server, or it could be a bug in Zotero's downloading code for EBSCO, though I don't believe we've received any other reports of it. (In the rare cases where there's a bug that causes this in Zotero's site-specific code, it generally happens when downloading multiple files at the same time from a search results page, not over the course of separate saves minutes apart.) This isn't any sort of general problem in Zotero that would affect downloads from other sites.

    If you can reproduce this on EBSCO, the relevant test would be to then try to load the PDFs on the EBSCO site to see if you get served the same files.
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