Evidence Synthesis Methods Interest Group

Good morning, colleagues!

I'd like to extend my gratitude for the speedy and thorough responses to my late afternoon Friday query. This community is truly wonderful. I was asked for a summary of responses, so below please find a synthesis of the replies I received as well as some additional info I dug up from the Zotero forums.

Covidence

• Does not offer full-text retrieval using a link resolver, but can bulk upload if you have PDFs compiled

EndNote

• With your link resolver, can find some full text PDFs
• I heard mixed reviews of the success rate, but the gist seems to be that it could be around 50%

HubMeta (which happens to be the screening tool the SR team is currently using)

• Not a current feature, but one that is in the works

Zotero

• This received the most positive reviews for full text retrieval; one person (Geoff Hill, thank you so much!) reported it was about twice as successful as EndNote when compared side by side
• The essential issue here is that Zotero only uses your link resolver via the Library Lookup tool in the Locate menu; Library Lookup can only be used on an individual reference and requires the usual multiple clicks to go from your link resolver's page to the actual PDF via the publisher or aggregator
•  "Find Available PDFs" is the bulk import feature
• This does not use web-based proxies at all
• Instead, it uses your IP address, so it works when connected to your campus network either on-campus or when using a traditional (not split-tunnel) VPN
• The search is based on DOIs or URLs, so that info must be in the record (from my own experience, I recommend Zotero DOI Manager to improve your DOI retrieval)
• There are some publisher sites with which Find Available PDFs won't work even when on campus, because (for example) they require PDF access via a drop-down menu on their site; Elsevier is a major culprit here
• Be cautious about running too many requests at once, to avoid being flagged as a bot
• One person reported that they might have greater success with Find Available PDFs on campus because they've got LibKey Nomad enabled in Chrome, but based on my research in the forums, I think that's probably not a factor (I could be wrong here)

Again, I'm very grateful for everyone's assistance. If you notice anything in here that seems off, please don't hesitate to reply to the list to correct me!

-Hilary