EBSCO, DOIs and Journal Abbr, pdfs

richardliu
In EBSCO, I am noticed that Zotero fills the Journal Abbr field if I am using MEDLINE but leaves the DOI field blank. Conversely, it fills the DOI field but leaves the Journal Abbr field blank if I am using Psycinfo. I clicked the checkbox for automatically attach associated pdf, but with both MEDLINE and Psycinfo, Zotero adds a tag that includes a useless accession number but no pdf. Is there a way around these problems?
  • adamsmith
    no, not really. We could probably get around the note (you don't mean tag, right?) - though I'm not sure if everyone agrees the accession number is useless, as it's the closest thing EBSCO has to a stable URL - but everything else depends on the data coming from EBSCO
  • ajlyon
    Can you confirm that the DOI and Journal Abbreviation are listed on the page you're saving from? If they are, then we should be able to get them with some post-processing-- adamsmith is right that that data is probably missing from the export data that EBSCO gives us.

    I'll try to see about PDF attachments-- there might be some database-specific tweaks we need to work out.
  • richardliu
    It seems you are correct about Psycinfo and MEDLINE on this DOI and Journal Abbreviation issue. (Pubmed seems to grab both the DOI and Journal Abbreviation. It also does not create an accession # tag which is nice.) How do you get around the tag issue in EBSCO? I find that after I download a copy of the pdf, there is never really any need for me to return to the url, so it would be nice not to have to delete the tag each time I add a new entry from EBSCO to my Zotero library. As for pdfs, I believe my only success with that automated feature so far is when I am at journal-specific sites. Even in EBSCO when there is a pdf directly accessible, Zotero does not extract it for me. Thanks for the help!
  • adamsmith
    If this is really a tag and not a note, you can disable the "automatically associate keywords" (or so) option in the Zotero preferences - but I'm pretty sure we're talking about a note - the yellow post-it - no? (I'm sorry to insist but it really is important to be precise when you report these things). That we would have to disable in the translator generally and for the reasons I point out above I'm not sure that's a good idea.

    PDFs - the problem with EBSCO - like an increasing number of publishers - is that they don't actually allow pdf download. They embed the pdf in a page. ajlyon has mentioned in the past that it might be possible for Zotero to get these types of pdfs, but currently we're not getting pdfs for any of the sites that do that - Wiley, Cambridge U press, EBSCO...(there are some - like Sage - which embed by default but still have a download link - those work).
    Of the large databases, JSTOR most reliably attaches pdfs (though you have to manually download one first to OK their copyright rules).
  • richardliu
    Sorry about the lack of clarity - I did mean the sticky note. Thanks also for explaining the pdf issue.
  • ajlyon
    I just tried to set up PDF downloading again, and I decided that this is just not worth the trouble. There's a mess of special parameters we need to set and reverse-engineer to get the PDFs automatically. I recommend setting up Zotfile, which can add the most recent file in a specified directory (like downloads) as an attachment to the selected item-- it can speed up adding PDFs manually.
  • ajlyon
    I just got PDF downloading working:
    Please go to http://github.com/ajlyon/translators/raw/master/EBSCOhost.js and save the file to the translators directory of your Zotero data directory (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data).

    It should start working. If this works for you, please post here so that I can submit this change to be pushed to all users.
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