Drop in success rate of "Find Available PDFs" tool

p.steward · October 31, 2023

Hi,

our data synthesis team has previously found the "Find Available PDFs" tool had a success rate of >90%. From the same university network we have recently found the success rate has nose-dived to <30%.

Has anyone else found a similar problem? Or is this just localized to our subscriptions/searches.

thanks,

Pete

dstillman · October 31, 2023

Can you provide a Debug ID for an attempt for a single item that fails that you expect should succeed?

p.steward · November 8, 2023

I have got this back from the team:

---Example 1---
D1630869169
that is the Debug ID for this paper https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2020.107738

---Example 2---
doi of the paper: 10.1016/j.fcr.2020.108002 d

I have a debug output I can send to you

dstillman · November 8, 2023

We need a Debug ID that covers the operation in question. The one you provided didn't log anything.

dstillman · November 8, 2023

(But if these are all ScienceDirect, that's likely the problem. In the last year or so SD/Elsevier added aggressive anti-bot protections that make it very hard for Zotero to function properly, much more so than on almost any other site. We'd still be curious to see a Debug ID, though.)

p.steward · November 8, 2023

we are even finding that open access articles are not being downloaded

dstillman · November 8, 2023

Yes, but if it's ScienceDirect, it's the same thing.

p.steward · November 8, 2023

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lTGPjgMvCy3cuYdEq_sVXrCUDdMKojTw/view?usp=sharing

p.steward · November 8, 2023

this is the log for the second paper
10.1016/j.fcr.2020.108002 d

dstillman · November 8, 2023

We'll see if there's anything we can do.

p.steward · November 13, 2023

any joy?

dstillman · November 14, 2023

ScienceDirect's anti-bot protections are indeed blocking the requests, but we're going to see if we can come up with a solution. No ETA, though.