When I visit WoS I see the following alert:

We are currently experiencing performance issues with Web of Knowledge access, search and navigation. Our technical staff is working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

That said, when I use either the new or old interface I can still download to bibTeX. Using the new interface:

At the very bottom of the web page you will see "Output Record" Steps one and two. Select the information you want in Step 1. In the Step 2 area you should use the drop-down menu to "Save to other reference software" and select BibTeX. The ISI version of BibTeX will probably require some hand editing but, in my experience, it always has.

From the top of the web page you can jump to the controls I described by clicking on the "more options" link to the right of the EndNote Web, EndNote, and ReferenceID chiclets.

Ok... further investigation reveals: When I searched Web of Science and selected the Help tab found “Save to BibTeX” in the Index:

Save to BibTeX

This format is only available to customers who subscribe to Web of Science or Inspec.

The strange thing is that this section is not on the Help tab for the other databases that we have on the Web of Knowledge.


So I may have been imagining that the bibtext option ever existed for ISI Web of Knowledge (so maybe I need to start a new thread?).

What I am using is the ISI Web of Knowledge All Databases (which for us includes things like CAB, Web of Science among others etc...). Having all of these databases in one interface is a huge convenience, but not when it's impossible to put records into Zotero.

Just the CAB database is supported by Zotero, and records pulled from sub-databases that Zotero supports appear. But not all the records on the page.

At various points in the past I know for a fact I've done workarounds. I may have made up the bibtext one (I just thought it worked because of that link I shared above) but for instance I know I used to be able to trick it into exporting into an RIS file (for RefWorks I think) that Zotero could grab.

Now all it does is export into a proprietary format that will export to Endnote (of course).

Does anyone know of a workaround to get records from an All Databases ISI Web of Knowledge search into Zotero that does not involve using Endnote?

Web Of Knowledge come out in proprietary format, or html, txt, or tab-delimited but I have no idea how to get any of those.

I can provide screenshots if it would help, or make a new thread.

Please go to http://github.com/ajlyon/translators/raw/master/ISI Web of Knowledge.js and save the file to the translators directory of your Zotero data directory (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data).

Restart Firefox after installing. After installing, it should be possible to use Import from clipboard on ISI-formatted data. I wasn't able to test this with the website, since I'm getting server errors. Hopefully those will pass when they finish the present maintenance.

The main thing you can do to test this is to post any records that fail to import correctly. I'm glad you find it useful, and I'm particularly glad to hear that it still works with the site-- I was afraid I might have broken the web support.

Yes, the address bar icon works for part of WoK. I plan on making it work for the remaining databases, but that hasn't happened yet.

I spent some time exploring what it would take to make other databases work, but the site is quite a mess to work with, and I'm afraid I probably won't have the time to negotiate the arcane ways ISI makes it hard to script the site.

Glad that the import is working for you. You may be able to mark records, then import them in batches to save time as well.

The current way to do so is to click on "Save to Endnote", then open the resulting file in something like Notepad, copy the contents (Ctrl-C) and select Import from Clipboard in Zotero.

But I just submitted a patch to make Zotero intercept the ISI files when you click on "Save to Endnote", so you should be able to just click on that button and the reference will save correctly, starting in Zotero 2.1.9 (which, to judge by the rumblings on the forum, should be pretty soon).

Hi, I just noticed that I'm no longer able to save from WoS/WoK, though I could maybe a couple months ago, so I suspect my issues are as described in this thread, and due to WoK's recent changes (I still get the URL icon for a paper I want to add, but when I click, the purple Zotero window says "Could not save item"; I can still add info from e.g. amazon). The short version of my query here is, would somebody be so kind to dumb down the best solution(s) to v.1.0 for me, (e.g. copy this text, make a new file in XX directory called ?.? with this as its contents, delete the previous one, ...), as I am presently going to the various places described in this and other threads in an attempt to do one of a handful of solution options, but don't really know what to do when I get there, how to impart this info to Zotero on my machine to make it happen. In case it matters, I'm running XP on an IBM T42, Firefox 6.0 and Zotero 2.1.8.

Thanks kindly for this thread and potential future help! :-)

Thanks for your help, ajlyon; I had seen these directions, but the first link took me to a page of code, with no downloadable file; I only just realised that if I clicked 'save page as', it would save it as a *.js file; then it's just a matter of finding the right directory, per your second link.

As it turns out, after I did all that to provide a new ISI WoK translator file, and reloaded firefox, it still didn't work for me. ONce at a science paper summary page on WoS, I downloaded the file with the Endnote button, saved to/opened with Notepad, copied all the text, then tried to Import from Clipboard on Zotero, but got: "An error occurred while trying to import the selected file. Please ensure that the file is valid and try again." I also noticed, as an aside, that with the new translator, the URL icons are reversed: I now get the *paper* icon for a list of papers, and the *file folder* icon when I open a link to a single paper's info. If you would like concrete examples with pages, etc. for your troubleshooting purposes, or more about either of the above problems, I'd be happy to share (offline, so as not to bore everybody).

Also, possibly of general interest to those on the forum, the work-around I'm now using is to simply copy the DOI for the paper of interest and paste it directly into the window spawned by clicking "Add item by identifier" in Zotero. Almost as fast as the 1-click procedure we had a couple months ago before WoS changed everything.

Hi I am having the same problem as hjcrabtree and jlichstein. Additionally, when I try to add items directly using the DOI and the magic wand button, it doesn't recognize the DOI even though it's a legit DOI. Just wondering if anyone has been able to fix this as I am in the middle of using Web of Science for a systematic review :)

I now get the *paper* icon for a list of papers, and the *file folder* icon when I open a link to a single paper's info. If you would like concrete examples with pages, etc. for your troubleshooting purposes, or more about either of the above problems, I'd be happy to share

Can you provide examples (online-- that's what the forum is for)? I'd like to work out the wrinkles here and make this work smoothly again.

Looking closer I have noticed that this happens everytime now it seems. This could be related to the fact that when I am on a search results page the icon in the corner of my browser is the paper icon and when I click on a specific paper the icon in the corner is the folder icon. Help - this is really annoying me and I use WOK a lot. (Apart from this Zotero is great!)

unless you have the beta version of Zotero (3.0b2) you can't use Zotero in Firefox and Standalone at the same time