Problems Exporting Citations from EBSCO Databases

pvictorjr
Hi,

I'm a librarian at Eastern Washington University. Today I was giving a Zotero demo to students on exporting citations from EBSCO to Zotero. Specifically, I tried to export articles from SportDiscus, Medline & HealthSource: Nursing/Academic collections using the Zotero connector in my browser (the latest version of Google Chrome). But the export wouldn't work. Later on, I tried downloading citations again from EBSCO and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't. If it did, it was usually only if I downloaded one article at a time. I tried downloading articles from other sources such as PubMed or JSTOR and it worked fine. But not EBSCO. EBSCO changed their interface recently. Has anyone reported a problem downloading citations with the new EBSCO interface? FYI, I also downloaded the latest Zotero software (version 9) and it didn't fix the problem.

            Thanks,

Paul
  • adamsmith
    Works for me in what I think is the new EBSCO interface.

    When you say it wouldn't work, what exactly happened? It's possible you're seeing bot protection kick in if you're trying to import a bunch of articles quickly -- EBSCO is known to be particularly aggressive on that.
  • pvictorjr
    Didn't work = none of the articles I tried to export from EBSCO arrived in my Zotero folder. I've exported many times from the old EBSCO interface. But I don't know if I've done it since we've migrated to the new interface. So I'm wondering if somehow the new EBSCO interface doesn't work properly with Zotero. Here's the new EBSCO interface we migrated to a few months ago [https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u10792501/a6xp1epr225q2vhgg7r1.png].

    I don't know what you're talking about regarding bot protection. What do you mean?

  • adamsmith
    (screenshot is here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u10792501/a6xp1epr225q2vhgg7r1.png )

    yeah, that's the same interface we're on and I have this working, so it's certainly not just the interface, though it might play a role.

    Bot protections are measures that vendors take to prevent large scale automated download of materials from their sites (which are against their ToS). All vendors have them, but EBSCO's, Elsevier's, and ProQuest's are particuarly quick to kick in with fairly regularly use, like downloading 20 papers to Zotero.
  • pvictorjr
    OK, gotcha. But I'm not doing large batch downloads. I'm usually selecting 3-6 article citations to export from EBSCO to Zotero. I've done it many times and never had an issue. And I don't know why it's suddenly not working for me. How do I fix it?
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