"Find full text" failure. Why?

I’ve just imported a bunch of references from Web of Science. They all contain authors, article titles, DOIs, etc.

Half of them failed to find full text.

How can I find out why they failed? Wrong DOI, mismatching details??? How can I fix it? I got 41 full texts, 58 failures.

If I search for the DOI from a failed reference, I get a link straight to (for example) ScienceDirect, and I can download the PDF (as I’m on-campus).

How can I find out why they failed?

I would attach an example library (enl file), but “The contents of the attachment doesn’t match its file type.”

The failed papers are probably from subscription journals - these will work when you are on campus as the journal recognised your IP address(es).

If your campus provides a VPN signing in to this may improve the retrieval rate. Otherwise you can ask your library whether they have an openURL resolver (eg SFX, OneCate) and how to authenticate offsite. These details can then be put into the Find Fulltext settings in EndNote’s preferences.

Even with this some journals will still fail - we notice this particularly with Cell Press journals via ScienceDirect, but you can always as a last resort download a pdf and manually add it to the record.

Hope this helps.

I’m on-campus right now, plugged into the campus network. I can go straight to sciencedirect (et al) and it all works.

The vast majority of the failures are ScienceDirect. There are a few society journals that I wouldn’t expect to work. I have an OpenURL.

If EndNote gave some feedback as to _why_ they failed, I could attempt to diagnose my issue.

Hi,
I have the same problem and it is getting more and more frustrating.

This “last resort” option of manually downloading and attaching pdf documents to Endnote references is necessary with everything from Science Direct it seems. For me that translates to about one third of references. This issue is not resolved by being on campus, has been a problem for some time and is not resolved in Endnote 20. Automatically finding full text documents is a central purpose of using a reference manager. Can it not finally be resolved? Is there another thread with the answers?

cheers,
Peter Bengtson
Uni Heidelberg

The “Find Full Text” feature gets sabotaged bon Elsevier’s ScienceDirect’s end. They seek to keep users corralled within their walled garden. Full text PDF’s go seamlessly into Mendeley library I’m told, and it’s bumpier with EndNote.  If you navigate to the ScienceDirect webpage for an article, you see a prominent “Download PDF” button with the Adobe Acrobat PDF icon. However, when you click it and the full text appears, you will not it didn’t really open into Adobe’s or whichever direct PDF reader. It is still in a browser page, now with a URL that includes //reader.elsevier.com/reader/ … It’s their own proprietary reader and it’s not a true PDF file.  I thought I found a solution while playing around to explain why it doesn’t work, because on their enhanced reader settings page there is an option to turn off their Elsevier reader, and I got EndNote to import one directly from STOTEN. But then I several more even from the same journal and couldn’t get it to repeat. So I suspect there’s a way, for me it wasn’t stable, cookies, browsers, publishers and EndNote are finicky.

(https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17829/supporthub/sciencedirect/)

Btw, how are you doing with Wiley journals in this regard? Not well, I suspect. Wiley pulls the same trick, but they are aligned with Digital Science’s ReadCube. 

For me, the futzing trying to get the direct import to work was taking more time than the extra download clicking. In Windows 10, I’ve minimized my clicking by downloading from the ScienceDirect site into default Downloads folder, and then Add File within EN. Then I select Quick Access and scroll down at the downloaded file will be at the top of the recent files. Not as slick as Find Full Text, but I just timed one and it was about 15 seconds from the first click.