Zotero not importing properly

mcspirits
Hello - Zotero for some reason is not reading my library's search engine like it used to - is this a possible glitch with the updates? Zotero is now reading peer-reviewed journal articles as "Web pages" and is not taking down all the vital information. Is there a fix to this? I was showing my graduate students this neat program yesterday and to my embarrassment this was happening and it continues today with a hard wire connection on both my systems. I want to resolve this to save some face with my graduate students especially. The library is here through Eastern Kentucky University https://libguides.eku.edu/library
  • adamsmith
    (That's EBSCO Discovery; you can search as Guest with the small button under the search bar -- I'm seeing the same issue.
  • mcspirits
    Thanks Adam! Hoping this issue can be resolved soon as we are working on a grant project and are planning to use ZOTERO to build our reference base
  • adamsmith
    When you're looking at a search (or an item, doesn't matter) how does your URL start? Do you have something like
    https://discovery.ebsco.com/c/d
    or something like
    https://eds.p.ebscohost.com/eds/
    ?

    The former seems like a new format they're serving (to some browsers???) and I don't yet see what Zotero would do with that.
  • mcspirits
    Yes- the search engine opens up in the former version now - is there any workaround or suggestion that you might have on how to proceed. I was so hoping that this semester my students could work with Zotero as their bibliography generator as that is the generator I have been using for nearly 10 years....
  • mcspirits
    Here is our library's tech support response to the issue:

    As per their documentation, EBSCO doesn't officially support Zotero in their non EBSCOhost interfaces, so I'm not expecting much help from their end. https://connect.ebsco.com/s/article/Does-EBSCOhost-work-with-Zotero?language=en_US

    The plus side is that it should still be compatible with the EBSCOhost databases like Academic Search Ultimate, CINAHL Ultimate, etc. which can still be accessed from the Online Resources link on the library home page.

    However, I found a thread in the Zotero forums where an admin appeared willing to help another person reporting a similar problem at a different university. Unfortunately, that university didn't allow unauthenticated access to the discovery layer, so they weren't able to help at that time. I resurrected the thread with a comment linking to the guest access to our discovery layer, so hopefully they will be able to help. I took a look at the GitHub repository for the "translators" that Zotero uses to scrape websites and grab articles, and saw that the EBSCO one hadn't been updated in about a year, so I'm not surprised that it isn't working properly with the new interface.

    Unfortunately, we have no way to roll back the interface to the previous version as EBSCO is gradually moving all of their platforms to the new interface for all of their customers. Since Zotero is an open source software project, it relies on the community to push updates. Hopefully more people will encounter the issue as the new interface becomes more widely adopted and add to the effort to update the software.
    Sorry I don't have an immediate solution

  • hillakilla09
    I am having this same issue. From the detailed record page on EBSCO, Zotero is saving as a webpage, which means I have to go in and manually enter everything. My urls start "web.p.ebscohost.com" Hopefully this issue can get solved somehow!
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited April 24, 2023
    Remember, you can always follow the links to the publishers' websites from the EBSCO record. You will need to do this record by record. While this will be more tedious and time-consuming, you will often receive more complete metadata from the publisher.

    edit This will be less tedious and more accurate than hand-entry of the metadata and abstract
  • adamsmith
    @hillakilla09 But generally this should work from EBSCO. We'd want, in a new thread, a full URL, exactly as you see it, as well as the permalink for the item in question and the database(s) you're using.

    The above error report was for EBSCO Discovery, which has a completely new interface and which we since added with the help of one of the libraries involved.
  • hillakilla09
    Thanks, I'll create a new thread to flesh out my particular issue further.

    I did follow the link to the publisher's website, but they didn't have the full archive, or at least I would've needed a subscriber ID to access it from their website. Easier for me to just fill it in manually in Zotero at that point.
Sign In or Register to comment.