I see, thank you. That's too bad. So, then, it doesn't appear that this is something that you can fix on your side, and is seemingly just an issue with Zotero's API?

Hi Christian,

Thank you so much for investigating this more.

You may have already put it together, but the characters on the page you linked looks to me like the codes Zotero uses to store each PDF. Zotero's internal directory for PDFs seems to store local PDFs in individual folders with the same length string. I can confirm that I looked up some files and they do seem to match that page, and the number of unique strings on that page seems to correlate with the number of PDFs in the group library (it has 580, though on my library I'm counting 581 actually).

I have changed the group to public closed as of a few hours ago. I misunderstood Zotero's restrictions and thought group file storage was only enabled on private groups, but it does include public closed groups, which I probably should have used to begin with in case it disabled access from BibBase. Hopefully that's just a silly mistake that fixes the issue, however, I have not seen any change on my linked BibBase page regarding PDFs since changing the group status. But I have also not seen it update a change to a citation I have tried to make in my Zotero group library, so the BibBase page could just be very slow to update right now or stuck for some reason.

Hi Christian,

Wow! Thank you for the quick fix and response. I'm glad the detail was helpful. The links do indeed seem to be working, which is great! Thank you for adding an option to get around that problem for this specific use case, that is very appreciated.

To clarify regarding the noIndex=1 option, how exactly is this to be included in the link? For example, in this link for the Mendeley-linked page, https://bibbase.org/service/mendeley/7a51828e-9782-3fa4-8bdb-357443954bfc/group/b49ab5c8-edb7-3544-9fc1-ebbc7f3ac750#, would it be appended directly after the "#", so "#noIndex=1", or with a "?", "/", "&" or something? Sorry I'm not well versed in networking / web pages : ).

And in the links we use to embed onto our Wordpress page a publications list for certain groups of references categorized by keyword, would it be the same?

<script src="https://bibbase.org/service/mendeley/7a51828e-9782-3fa4-8bdb-357443954bfc/group/b49ab5c8-edb7-3544-9fc1-ebbc7f3ac750?jsonp=1&filter=keywords:Determinants&nbspof&nbspWealth&nbspand&nbspWealth&nbspInequality&sort=title"></script>

Appending right after "&sort=title"?

Just want to make sure I have things right, as any of the ideas I suggested seem to return the page fine, so I'm not sure which is correct, if any. Once I know I have the right one I should be able to get that updated on our Wordpress site (and make sure to only visit the page with the correct link for now) which would help make sure everything will work as intended if the Mendeley-linked page is ultimately disconnected.

And just to make sure I understand, if I am able to correctly link to the Mendeley-linked page such that it does not update the database as described, what exactly could I do to try to trigger any other of our pages being the "one" that updates the database? I.e., simply creating a new page, or simply visiting the bibbase.org/network/publications . . . links of a particular reference?

Thank you!

Adam

Hi Christian,

Thank you for the explanation. This sounds like it would be a workable solution, allowing my group to utilize Zotero and without too much hassle manually extract a .bib and relevant PDFs to be uploaded directly to BibBase. I have run into some problems implementing this, however.

I have attempted to create a BibTeX file from my Zotero library that could have each reference link to it's title.pdf, as in your example. I have uploaded this all to my personal account and have uploaded two PDFs as a test, but the links to the PDFs on the BibBase page do not work. On my website editor file manager, I can access another link to the files there, and I have verified they are named the same as is referenced in the .bib, but I cannot seem to get it to work.

I have tried it without underscores in the PDF titles, replacing them with commas (i.e., author, year, title.pdf, instead of author_year_title.pdf), as I read on one of the documentation pages that these would be removed for something (though when editing the .bib on the website it seems like they are still there), but this did not help either. I have made different .bibs and pages with different variations of the url feature in the .bib (i.e., differentiating it from any other url's in the reference by naming it url_Paper, and then making sure any other urls were named url_Link), but this also doesn't seem to fix it.

I have made my page public so hopefully you can see it if you need to, here. The two references for which I've uploaded the PDFs for are "The Concentration of Personal Wealth in Italy 1995–2016. Acciari, P., Alvaredo, F., & Morelli, S. 2021." and "Intergenerational Wealth Transfers and Wealth Inequality in Rich Countries: What Do We Learn from Gini Decomposition?. Nolan et al. 2021." I'm not sure if these are public as well, but this is the link given to me for Nolan et al. on the website editor, which works, and here is the link that the linked BibBase page tries to direct to, resulting only in "error: file not found".

Also--another issue I have noticed before but particularly today--I have found that while on a particular publications list page the drop-down for the BibTeX on a particular reference or anything else will return what came from the specific .bib that page is pulling from, when visiting the link to a particular reference (e.g., bibbase.org/network/publication/ . . .) sometimes this will lead me to an alternate version of the reference, seemingly pulled from one of our other BibBase pages, resulting in a different BibTeX being displayed (unwanted, particularly when it pulls from our Mendeley-linked page which is what we are trying to switch from as the BibTeX output from that page is very messy for whatever reason) and other details. At first I noticed the references on my original Zotero-linked BibBase page referenced at the start of this thread were now being linked ultimately to the same references in our Mendeley-linked page, but now at this moment they are being linked to one of the pages I have created today on my personal account (I can tell because the BibTeX contains the url = title.pdf field).

This makes things very messy and hard to control, and I'm not sure how much of this is resolvable as I assume it is somewhat fundamental to BibBase's structure. I assume perhaps this would be fixed if the BibBase API access for the Mendeley account linked to the other page was revoked and my other pages deleted, but I am quite remiss to do that in hopes that it would fix anything until I know it actually would -- the Mendeley-linked page in particular is live on our organization's website.

Apologies for the long message, hopefully this is clear. If you'd like me to split any of this off into another thread please just let me know.

Thank you so much,

Adam

Hi Christian,

Got it, that's understandable, thank you. I actually was just about to edit my comment that I realized I could go ahead and purchase a $20 premium subscription on a personal account and cancel the reoccuring subscription as a one-time donation, so I've gone ahead and done that. Thank you for all your help.

Regarding directly uploading .bib files, while the lack of automatic cloud updating isn't too much of an issue, the real reason we have been using Mendeley/Zotero is for the easy PDF storage. I saw when upgrading to the professional premium plan mention of 8GB of storage, but I'm having trouble figuring out how that works. Is it possible to have a BibBase page generated directly from a user-uploaded .bib file that can point to PDFs for the references, hosted by BibBase (or even some other server/service?).

Hi Christian,

That's too bad -- I know about the premium plans but am using BibBase as part of an organization, and am not sure we need any of the upgraded features for our specific use. But I will keep it in mind.

Also, apologies if this is an improper use of the thread, but are you aware of the issue I raised in a comment on another thread regarding PDF links being unavailable through the same Zotero-linked BibBase page? I figure you probably are but it can't hurt to check -- it would be nice to have confirmation that it is being looked at and may potentially be solved sometime soon, as otherwise I need to perhaps soon move back to Mendeley or another method of interacting with BibBase.

Thank you,

Adam

Hi Christian,

Thank you so much for fixing this so quickly! Wow. That is very much appreciated. I will definitely give you a shout on Twitter. If there is a way to donate, please let me know -- I can't see one.

I see...some of this seems like it may be accidental duplicates that I can look into, but this also appears to be happening with the references for working papers and their published alternative editions. Given that our library deals in economics, there are a fair amount of pairs of very similar, though different, references like this. It is strange, because when I look at the .bib output from Mendeley that I fed into Zotero, it had different entry keys which did not contain these duplicates it seems. But exporting a .bib now from Zotero, which is what BibBase is utilizing clearly, I see the entries you've highlighted and their duplicate counterparts appended with "-1".

Thank you so much for looking into this so quickly. Do you have any idea as to how I could fix this and separate the working papers from their published versions while still utilizing Zotero (i.e., other than manually adjusting a .bib and uploading it, losing the utility of Zotero and it's automatic uploading and cloud storage)? I'm not sure what I can do to affect what entry key Zotero utilizes in it's BibTeX output.

Hi, are there any updates to this issue? I am attempting to transfer my organization's BibBase page from one connected to a Mendeley library to one connected to the same library in Zotero. While the PDFs are linked to on the BibBase page connected to Mendeley, the same PDFs (only this time hosted on Zotero's cloud storage instead of Mendeley's) attached to the same references are not available on my new BibBase page linked to a Zotero library. The only occasional PDF attachments that come up are when the URL included to the BibTeX is linking directly to an online PDF. It is not pulling any of the PDFs from Zotero.

Thank you so much for all your work.

Hi,

Are there any updates to problem #2? I am working on a BibBase page that pulls from Mendeley. When exporting BibTeX from the Mendeley desktop app, it is rather clean, but when exporting BibTeX from the BibBase page it has loads and loads of extra information that is unnecessary. This makes the .bib files difficult to work with when importing elsewhere, which is a primary concern for us.

For example, here is the BibTeX for a paper exported from Mendeley Desktop:

@article{Nolan2021,
   abstract = {The role of intergenerational transfers of wealth via inheritance and gifts inter vivos in the accumulation of household wealth and the generation of wealth inequality has been hotly debated. This paper uses data from household wealth surveys for six rich countries – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US – to assess the contribution of intergenerational wealth transfers to wealth inequality using decomposition methods for the Gini coefficient. The results show that transfer wealth is consistently a good deal more unequally distributed than non-transfer wealth and total wealth. Transfer wealth accounts for only about one-tenth of overall wealth inequality for the US compared to one-third for Germany and Italy. This mirrors the importance of transfer wealth in total wealth in each country, with differences in inequality in transfer wealth and its correlation with total wealth having only a modest impact. We find that a marginal percentage increase in all transfers reduces total wealth inequality in Britain, Germany and the US, while it would increase total wealth inequality in France, Italy and Spain.},
   author = {Brian Nolan and Juan C. Palomino and Philippe Van Kerm and Salvatore Morelli},
   doi = {10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109701},
   issn = {01651765},
   journal = {Economics Letters},
   keywords = {Cross-national Comparisons of Wealth Inequality,Determinants of Wealth and Wealth Inequality,Intergenerational Transfers of Wealth},
   pages = {3},
   title = {Intergenerational Wealth Transfers and Wealth Inequality in Rich Countries: What Do We Learn from Gini Decomposition?},
   volume = {199},
   url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109701},
   year = {2021},
}

And here is the BibTeX output for the same paper as seen on the BibBase page, which is pulled from that exact Mendeley citation:

@article{
 title = {The Rise of Modern Taxation: A New Comprehensive Dataset of Tax Introductions Worldwide},
 type = {article},
 year = {2021},
 identifiers = {[object Object]},
 keywords = {EIG Taxes,Intergenerational Transfers of Wealth},
 pages = {239–263},
 volume = {16},
 websites = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-019-09359-9},
 month = {1},
 day = {22},
 id = {fc68f1bd-97ba-3d52-af2b-a9cfbaae1c55},
 created = {2019-10-28T16:58:23.523Z},
 file_attached = {true},
 profile_id = {c5c01eee-cfc7-3137-abb2-73f22c1caf62},
 group_id = {b49ab5c8-edb7-3544-9fc1-ebbc7f3ac750},
 last_modified = {2021-06-09T15:41:36.031Z},
 read = {false},
 starred = {false},
 authored = {false},
 confirmed = {true},
 hidden = {false},
 citation_key = {Seelkopf2019},
 folder_uuids = {a00a2cf9-e801-4520-9268-0d6fcaaf10ac},
 private_publication = {false},
 abstract = {This article describes the new Tax Introduction Dataset (TID). Listing the year and the mode of the first permanent introduction of six major taxes (inheritance tax, personal income tax, corporate income tax, social security contributions, general sales tax and value added tax) in 220 countries, 1750–2018, TID is the most comprehensive dataset of its kind. The comprehensiveness of our measure is of critical value to empirical work on the causes of tax innovation and its consequences for state, society and economy. In this paper, we explain the selection of our tax sample and the structure of the dataset, descriptively map temporal and regional patterns of tax introductions around the world, and draw on TID to investigate associations between tax introductions and economic development, war, and democratization.},
 bibtype = {article},
 author = {Seelkopf, Laura and Bubek, Moritz and Eihmanis, Edgars and Ganderson, Joseph and Limberg, Julian and Mnaili, Youssef and Zuluaga, Paula and Genschel, Philipp},
 journal = {The Review of International Organizations},
 number = {1}
}

I have tested out switching to Zotero but have encountered other issues -- it seems that sticking with Mendeley would be much easier. Is there any way to clean up the BibBase BibTeX?

Thank you,

Adam