Metadata Retrieval
I've just been told that zotero can only search for metadata through google scholar. Is there any way that you can add a feature that will allow you to search multiple databases like Web of Science for the metadata, and not just google scholar? I think that would help a lot of researchers! Thanks for the consideration!
I should add that I am strongly in favor of having the ability to do PDF metadata extraction from pubmed or elsewhere, but I do understand the impetus of the dev team to use the single most versatile database for metadata extraction. My zotero wishlist includes a setting to allow user choice of the default metadata extraction database (which would be PubMed for my purposes).
There is no easy way for Zotero to determine partial metadata from most PDFs, which would be needed for WoS support.
"Google
Sorry...
We're sorry...
... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
See Google Help for more information."
The Google help article that is linked from that page says automated queries are against Google's terms of service, so are we breaking the rules? Are they going to cut Zotero off completely once they figure out what is going on? Should Zotero find another way to get PDF metadata? I say yes, not because I have any problem with Google Scholar, but because we seem to be violating their terms.
Remember google does try to not be evil, Zotero is in no way a competitor and so I think there is a pretty decent chance that they would be willing to tweak their "lock-down" algorithm to play a little nicer with Zotero users.
That problem occurred to me, too, after I had written that.
I also ran into trouble when retrieving data from google scholar. Not only zotero stopped working, but I was unable to use scholar for a while.
google ublocks the service if you enter a captcha, but it seems if you had too many invalid accesses you don't even get the captcha anymore (at least until you delete the cookies). Could we at least make zotero determine when it gets blocked and not send even more requests (and maybe send the user to the captcha page).