Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Christiaan Hofman]

Colin Smith just added some changes that should make it possible to connect to 
the ISI servers, as they are currently configured, back. I cannot test this 
myself. But it should be available in the next nightly build somewhere later 
today.

Christiaan

On Oct 13, 2012, at 11:54, Fischlin Andreas wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I had a visit from two official representatives from Thomson Reuters 
> concerning their changed web services. A representative from the main library 
> (www.library.ethz.ch/en/) at my unversity, 
> i.e. ETH Zurich (www.ethz.ch), was also present.
> 
> The discussion was fruitful and I got promises from Thomson Reuters they 
> would make efforts to give us the ISI WOS access via BibDesk back, at least 
> to some extent.
> 
> Since this topic should rather be discussed in the developer mailing list I 
> will stop writing on this topic until it becomes again of interest for 
> BibDesk end users. For the time being none of us I guess knows exactly by 
> when and in what precise form we can regain the same services we enjoyed up 
> to August 31st 2012 as BibDesk users from the ISI WOS data base services.
> 
> Please note also, that the delay resulted also from the inability of Thomson 
> Reuters to understand the issue and to answer properly all the questions the 
> main library from my university (ETH Zurich, www.ethz.ch) 
> and I asked them. Before I get now really these awaited answers, it is very 
> difficult to assess how much effort will be required on our BibDesk side to 
> get all back to what it once was and whether that will actually be possible. 
> Fortunately, given the promises Thomson Reuters representatives made to me in 
> terms of giving us good support, technical information, including a special 
> access while modifying BibDesk I hope we will find really soon now a 
> solution. But please understand, that from my understanding any promises 
> would currently be premature. Therefore please wait until things have further 
> cleared up.
> 
> On the other hand, if anyone should be able to help clarifying the situation, 
> for instance if some other response from TR was given to you, please inform 
> us all of this. Thanks.
> 
> Regards,
> Andreas
> 
> 
> ETH Zurich
> Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischlin
> Systems Ecology - Institute of Integrative Biology
> CHN E 21.1
> Universitaetstrasse 16
> 8092 Zurich
> SWITZERLAND
> 
> andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch
> www.sysecol.ethz.ch
> 
> +41 44 633-6090 phone
> +41 44 633-1136 fax
> +41 79 595-4050 mobile
> 
> Make it as simple as possible, but distrust it!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 12/Sep/2012, at 17:18 , Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sep 12, 2012, at 07:38 , Fischlin Andreas 
> mailto:andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch>> wrote:
> 
> In the meantime I will try to help by getting at the technical official 
> specifications of the new version.
> 
> This appears to be the latest version
> 
> http://search.isiknowledge.com/esti/cxf-wsclient-demo/docs/soap/index.html
> 
> and is mostly correct insofar as the current search API is concerned.  It is 
> much better than their previous documentation.  If you discover that it is 
> superseded, let me know.
> 
> I have one last question at the moment: Would you know wether the SOAP 
> protocol version 2.0 has already been available previously, i.e. in parallel 
> with version 1.0?
> 
> No idea.  You'd have to ask TR.  BibDesk's support dates to 2007, and the 
> documentation I have for the old service is copyright 2006.
> 
> adam


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Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Fischlin Andreas]

Dear all,

I had a visit from two official representatives from Thomson Reuters concerning 
their changed web services. A representative from the main library 
(www.library.ethz.ch/en/) at my unversity, i.e. 
ETH Zurich (www.ethz.ch), was also present.

The discussion was fruitful and I got promises from Thomson Reuters they would 
make efforts to give us the ISI WOS access via BibDesk back, at least to some 
extent.

Since this topic should rather be discussed in the developer mailing list I 
will stop writing on this topic until it becomes again of interest for BibDesk 
end users. For the time being none of us I guess knows exactly by when and in 
what precise form we can regain the same services we enjoyed up to August 31st 
2012 as BibDesk users from the ISI WOS data base services.

Please note also, that the delay resulted also from the inability of Thomson 
Reuters to understand the issue and to answer properly all the questions the 
main library from my university (ETH Zurich, www.ethz.ch) 
and I asked them. Before I get now really these awaited answers, it is very 
difficult to assess how much effort will be required on our BibDesk side to get 
all back to what it once was and whether that will actually be possible. 
Fortunately, given the promises Thomson Reuters representatives made to me in 
terms of giving us good support, technical information, including a special 
access while modifying BibDesk I hope we will find really soon now a solution. 
But please understand, that from my understanding any promises would currently 
be premature. Therefore please wait until things have further cleared up.

On the other hand, if anyone should be able to help clarifying the situation, 
for instance if some other response from TR was given to you, please inform us 
all of this. Thanks.

Regards,
Andreas


ETH Zurich
Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischlin
Systems Ecology - Institute of Integrative Biology
CHN E 21.1
Universitaetstrasse 16
8092 Zurich
SWITZERLAND

andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch
www.sysecol.ethz.ch

+41 44 633-6090 phone
+41 44 633-1136 fax
+41 79 595-4050 mobile

 Make it as simple as possible, but distrust it!








On 12/Sep/2012, at 17:18 , Adam R. Maxwell wrote:


On Sep 12, 2012, at 07:38 , Fischlin Andreas 
mailto:andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch>> wrote:

In the meantime I will try to help by getting at the technical official 
specifications of the new version.

This appears to be the latest version

http://search.isiknowledge.com/esti/cxf-wsclient-demo/docs/soap/index.html

and is mostly correct insofar as the current search API is concerned.  It is 
much better than their previous documentation.  If you discover that it is 
superseded, let me know.

I have one last question at the moment: Would you know wether the SOAP protocol 
version 2.0 has already been available previously, i.e. in parallel with 
version 1.0?

No idea.  You'd have to ask TR.  BibDesk's support dates to 2007, and the 
documentation I have for the old service is copyright 2006.

adam


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Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Sep 12, 2012, at 07:38 , Fischlin Andreas  
wrote:

> In the meantime I will try to help by getting at the technical official 
> specifications of the new version.

This appears to be the latest version

http://search.isiknowledge.com/esti/cxf-wsclient-demo/docs/soap/index.html

and is mostly correct insofar as the current search API is concerned.  It is 
much better than their previous documentation.  If you discover that it is 
superseded, let me know.

> I have one last question at the moment: Would you know wether the SOAP 
> protocol version 2.0 has already been available previously, i.e. in parallel 
> with version 1.0?

No idea.  You'd have to ask TR.  BibDesk's support dates to 2007, and the 
documentation I have for the old service is copyright 2006.

adam


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Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Fischlin Andreas]

Dear Adam,

Thanks for all these most useful answers.

I concur with most you are saying and would only hope that a similarly 
convenient solution can be found using BibDesk as we had in the past.

In the meantime I will try to help by getting at the technical official 
specifications of the new version. We got conflicting answers from TR inasmuch 
as some of the answers we got state that TR merely changed their web services 
from version 1.0 to version 2.0 as of Aug.31st 2012 while another answer from 
TR claimed that the recent transition has made all web sites describing web 
services obsolete and that would explain the many faults I found there.  
Notably did I detect many dead links, exactly for those that want to describe 
differences between version 1.0 and 2.0 (e.g. 
http://search.isiknowledge.com/esti/docs/index.whats.new.html, which has indeed 
a suspiciously old date, i.e. 6 Aug 2009).

I have one last question at the moment: Would you know wether the SOAP protocol 
version 2.0 has already been available previously, i.e. in parallel with 
version 1.0? The date of aforementioned web side at least surprised me to be 
from 2009. If yes, could we have developed BibDesk earlier to support that as 
well or do the changes now necessary represent further changes, perhaps made by 
TR to the "same" version 2.0? I am asking because of the confusion that 
resulted on my side from the conflicting information given to me by TR (see 
above).

Regards,
Andreas


ETH Zurich
Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischlin
Systems Ecology - Institute of Integrative Biology
CHN E 21.1
Universitaetstrasse 16
8092 Zurich
SWITZERLAND

andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch
www.sysecol.ethz.ch

+41 44 633-6090 phone
+41 44 633-1136 fax
+41 79 595-4050 mobile

 Make it as simple as possible, but distrust it!








On 12/09/2012, at 06:39 , Adam R. Maxwell wrote:


On Sep 11, 2012, at 03:27 , Fischlin Andreas 
mailto:andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch>> wrote:

Dear Adam,

Many thanks. All the links to the source code you gave me helps me a lot to 
understand the situation much better. A pity this is so elaborate.

In the meantime our case with Thomson Reuters resulted in directing us to a web 
site, of which the answer e-mail claimed, it would supersede the sites we 
discussed previously.

I did a few quick tests with Python and suds today to see how hard this would 
be.

First, using the old WSDL gives an error saying that the service is no longer 
supported; this confirms what we suspected.  Not sure why BibDesk isn't showing 
that error, but we probably need to manually check for a fault.

Second, I'm not sanguine about getting this to work with Apple's framework, as 
TR has started using complex objects instead of simple (albeit messy) string 
parameters.  Explicit authentication is also required, and you have to pass an 
HTTP cookie back with each search/retrieve request.  I've not dealt with 
serializing and deserializing objects in Apple's Web Services framework.

The easiest option at this point is shipping suds inside BibDesk, then writing 
a command-line tool that would do the Web Service stuff and echo back XML.  
Unfortunately, it's LGPL v3 and I'm not sure that's compatible with BibDesk's 
BSD license.  It's also 500 kbytes of files, though that's not a deal breaker.  
Not sure that other devs think of it.  Using gSOAP is also an option, but not 
as easy.

However, would it not be easier not to work with Mountain Lion first, in 
particular to overcome the caveats of the new protocol? Say, using the reliable 
Snow Leopard (or Lion, but I wouldn't use the word reliable in this case ;-) ). 
Once understood it might work even under Mountain Lion?

OS version is irrelevant.  Apple's Web Service code likely won't work any 
differently under 10.8.  Code that is deprecated isn't necessarily going away 
right now (though the jerks at Apple broke DataTank by removing 
XgridFoundation.framework in 10.8, after deprecating it in 10.7).

One further thought: Such SOAP like protocols 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP_(protocol)) may be of interest also in other 
cases.

BibDesk's DBLP search group also uses it.

Would it not be more robust for BibDesk to develop a generic module that can 
handle such queries while the syntax specifics of any given protocol are 
described with a meta language, e.g. similar as attributed EBNF 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBNF) this can do for programing languages. Then 
BibDesk could be extended by any query by simply providing the protocol 
description in form of that language?

You want a meta language on top of SOAP?  Forget it.  I'm not an expert, but 
IMO there's too much variety in Web Service interfaces to do something like 
that.  Generic isn't always better, and neither are layers of abstraction 
against a time when something might possibly be added (though I've per

Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Sep 11, 2012, at 03:27 , Fischlin Andreas  
wrote:

> Dear Adam,
> 
> Many thanks. All the links to the source code you gave me helps me a lot to 
> understand the situation much better. A pity this is so elaborate.
> 
> In the meantime our case with Thomson Reuters resulted in directing us to a 
> web site, of which the answer e-mail claimed, it would supersede the sites we 
> discussed previously.

I did a few quick tests with Python and suds today to see how hard this would 
be.  

First, using the old WSDL gives an error saying that the service is no longer 
supported; this confirms what we suspected.  Not sure why BibDesk isn't showing 
that error, but we probably need to manually check for a fault.

Second, I'm not sanguine about getting this to work with Apple's framework, as 
TR has started using complex objects instead of simple (albeit messy) string 
parameters.  Explicit authentication is also required, and you have to pass an 
HTTP cookie back with each search/retrieve request.  I've not dealt with 
serializing and deserializing objects in Apple's Web Services framework.

The easiest option at this point is shipping suds inside BibDesk, then writing 
a command-line tool that would do the Web Service stuff and echo back XML.  
Unfortunately, it's LGPL v3 and I'm not sure that's compatible with BibDesk's 
BSD license.  It's also 500 kbytes of files, though that's not a deal breaker.  
Not sure that other devs think of it.  Using gSOAP is also an option, but not 
as easy.

> However, would it not be easier not to work with Mountain Lion first, in 
> particular to overcome the caveats of the new protocol? Say, using the 
> reliable Snow Leopard (or Lion, but I wouldn't use the word reliable in this 
> case ;-) ). Once understood it might work even under Mountain Lion?

OS version is irrelevant.  Apple's Web Service code likely won't work any 
differently under 10.8.  Code that is deprecated isn't necessarily going away 
right now (though the jerks at Apple broke DataTank by removing 
XgridFoundation.framework in 10.8, after deprecating it in 10.7).

> One further thought: Such SOAP like protocols 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP_(protocol)) may be of interest also in 
> other cases.

BibDesk's DBLP search group also uses it.

> Would it not be more robust for BibDesk to develop a generic module that can 
> handle such queries while the syntax specifics of any given protocol are 
> described with a meta language, e.g. similar as attributed EBNF 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBNF) this can do for programing languages. 
> Then BibDesk could be extended by any query by simply providing the protocol 
> description in form of that language?

You want a meta language on top of SOAP?  Forget it.  I'm not an expert, but 
IMO there's too much variety in Web Service interfaces to do something like 
that.  Generic isn't always better, and neither are layers of abstraction 
against a time when something might possibly be added (though I've perpetrated 
some of those).

Now, a workable solution might be to define an API for writing search group 
plugins in Python, much as we did with script groups (yes, I'm heavily biased 
towards Python).  In the case of Web Service clients, it would be easier for a 
3rd party to add/maintain/modify a search group.  When we talked about this 
several years ago, I think we concluded that it would be cool, but a waste of 
time because it's not likely that 3rd parties will go to that effort.

> What is your experience with these interfaces? Are they clean? Formally well 
> designed or are they all just tedious, cumbersome patchwork full of 
> idiosyncrasies?

Web Services interfaces are all over the map; some are good, some are bad, and 
others are just weird.  None of the services I've used has performed exactly as 
documented, but that's a fairly small sample size.

Adam


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Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Fischlin Andreas]

Dear Adam,

Many thanks. All the links to the source code you gave me helps me a lot to 
understand the situation much better. A pity this is so elaborate.

In the meantime our case with Thomson Reuters resulted in directing us to a web 
site, of which the answer e-mail claimed, it would supersede the sites we 
discussed previously. Here is that URL, since it may also be of interest:

http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/products/related/webservices/

Despite all being very helpful what you wrote, it is certainly not good news. 
And I share several of your concerns only too easily. I am willing to help. My 
first step along this lines is currently to continue insisting that the company 
really helps us. My institution is paying AFAIK huge amounts of subscription 
fees, yet nobody seems to have informed us of the consequences of the 
transition as end of August nor do they really help at the moment to overcome 
the difficulties. The information they have provided so far are all very 
conflicting and no real progress can be seen. Obviously as an end-user one has 
to insist they help, given the way they have handled us during this recent 
transition, or we will never get anywhere. The case only exists, because I 
complained insistingly, which finally did trigger this case and so far a few 
reactions.

However, would it not be easier not to work with Mountain Lion first, in 
particular to overcome the caveats of the new protocol? Say, using the reliable 
Snow Leopard (or Lion, but I wouldn't use the word reliable in this case ;-) ). 
Once understood it might work even under Mountain Lion?

One further thought: Such SOAP like protocols 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP_(protocol)) may be of interest also in other 
cases. Would it not be more robust for BibDesk to develop a generic module that 
can handle such queries while the syntax specifics of any given protocol are 
described with a meta language, e.g. similar as attributed EBNF 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBNF) this can do for programing languages. Then 
BibDesk could be extended by any query by simply providing the protocol 
description in form of that language? What is your experience with these 
interfaces? Are they clean? Formally well designed or are they all just 
tedious, cumbersome patchwork full of idiosyncrasies?

Regards,
Andreas





On 11/09/2012, at 01:17 , Adam R. Maxwell wrote:


On Sep 10, 2012, at 14:48 , Fischlin Andreas 
mailto:andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch>> wrote:

Dear Adam,

Many thanks for this most valuable information. Indeed, in the meantime I got a 
confirmation from company Thomson Reuters that they have switched from version 
1.0 to 2.0 of their web services, including the SOAP access as of 31st August 
2012.

Well, that's a pretty clear indication of what has happened.

Unfortunately I need very urgently ISI WOS in BibDesk back.

Any idea what could be done?

New WS stub code [1] has to be generated with WSMakeStubs, it has to be checked 
for bugs, and then glue code has to be written to integrate the new service 
into BibDesk [2].  This last is the only significant task, and based on my 
cursory glance last week, it'll be a fairly extensive rewrite.  
BDSKISIWebServices.[hm] will be replace entirely, and BDSKISIGroupServer.m will 
have to be rewritten to use the new methods and error checking.

[1] 
http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIWebServices.m?revision=18776&view=markup

[2] 
http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIGroupServer.m?revision=18776&view=markup

I'd guess 4-8 hours work, assuming the new API is straightforward and not too 
different from the old one, but I have very low confidence in those 
assumptions, and I have no time to look at this myself before October.

Notably I have for sure following questions for the time being:

1) Where are search details as contained in a .bdsksearch file actually stored 
in BibDesk once such a search has been installed?
I have consulted the help pages, and examples of .bdsksearch files are also not 
that difficult to construct from scratch. But this all did not answer me this 
question. Have I overlooked something or is it really missing.

Those files are largely irrelevant for WoS searches; they just store a database 
name and human-readable counterpart.  Local additions should end up in 
~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/SearchGroupServers.

2) What URL is "Searches -> Web of Science SCI" using?
In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me this 
question, but I do not know what to answer.

The default endpoint is

http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve

See link [1] for details.

3) Can I edit or at least see Web of Science SCI search specs at the XML level?
Is there a way to edit a search once its .bdsksearch file has been installed? I 
looked for plist files, but neither inside the application BibDesk nor in 
~/Library/Application Support could I find the wante

Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Sep 10, 2012, at 14:48 , Fischlin Andreas  
wrote:

> Dear Adam,
> 
> Many thanks for this most valuable information. Indeed, in the meantime I got 
> a confirmation from company Thomson Reuters that they have switched from 
> version 1.0 to 2.0 of their web services, including the SOAP access as of 
> 31st August 2012.

Well, that's a pretty clear indication of what has happened.

> Unfortunately I need very urgently ISI WOS in BibDesk back.
> 
> Any idea what could be done?

New WS stub code [1] has to be generated with WSMakeStubs, it has to be checked 
for bugs, and then glue code has to be written to integrate the new service 
into BibDesk [2].  This last is the only significant task, and based on my 
cursory glance last week, it'll be a fairly extensive rewrite.  
BDSKISIWebServices.[hm] will be replace entirely, and BDSKISIGroupServer.m will 
have to be rewritten to use the new methods and error checking.

[1] 
http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIWebServices.m?revision=18776&view=markup

[2] 
http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIGroupServer.m?revision=18776&view=markup

I'd guess 4-8 hours work, assuming the new API is straightforward and not too 
different from the old one, but I have very low confidence in those 
assumptions, and I have no time to look at this myself before October.

> Notably I have for sure following questions for the time being:
> 
> 1) Where are search details as contained in a .bdsksearch file actually 
> stored in BibDesk once such a search has been installed?
> I have consulted the help pages, and examples of .bdsksearch files are also 
> not that difficult to construct from scratch. But this all did not answer me 
> this question. Have I overlooked something or is it really missing.

Those files are largely irrelevant for WoS searches; they just store a database 
name and human-readable counterpart.  Local additions should end up in 
~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/SearchGroupServers.

> 2) What URL is "Searches -> Web of Science SCI" using?
> In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me this 
> question, but I do not know what to answer.

The default endpoint is

http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve

See link [1] for details.

> 3) Can I edit or at least see Web of Science SCI search specs at the XML 
> level?
> Is there a way to edit a search once its .bdsksearch file has been installed? 
> I looked for plist files, but neither inside the application BibDesk nor in 
> ~/Library/Application Support could I find the wanted information.

No.  It will require writing Objective-C code.  Queries are constructed in 
-[BDSKISIGroupServer downloadWithSearchTerm:database:] and passed off to the 
generated WS code.  The bdsksearch files will not help you at all here, so 
forget about them.

> 4) Can I look at a SOAP protocol during an attempt to access the ISI WOS 
> service?
> In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me for the 
> exact error message that was returned, but I can not answer that question 
> unless I could look at the protocol of a query using SOAP access.

It should be logged to the console, if Apple gives it to us.

Apple's WebServices code is utter crap, to put it mildly.  It has longstanding 
bugs and feature gaps which have been ignored since it was introduced in 10.2.  
Rather than address those problems, Apple has deprecated their WebServicesCore 
framework in 10.8, with no replacement that I can find.  Typical.

Anyway, this latter point is something to keep in mind when working with Web 
Services on the Mac; Apple's framework problems can make things really hard to 
debug, so my estimates on time for this could be way off.  I used SUDS in 
Python for another project this year, and it was so much nicer that it wasn't 
even funny.  In fact, it would be tempting to look at the feasibility of 
bundling that with BibDesk, and writing a separate Python tool to do the WS 
search.

-- 
Adam


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Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Fischlin Andreas]

Dear Adam,

Many thanks for this most valuable information. Indeed, in the meantime I got a 
confirmation from company Thomson Reuters that they have switched from version 
1.0 to 2.0 of their web services, including the SOAP access as of 31st August 
2012.

Unfortunately I need very urgently ISI WOS in BibDesk back.

Any idea what could be done?

Notably I have for sure following questions for the time being:

1) Where are search details as contained in a .bdsksearch file actually stored 
in BibDesk once such a search has been installed?
 I have consulted the help pages, and examples of .bdsksearch files are also 
not that difficult to construct from scratch. But this all did not answer me 
this question. Have I overlooked something or is it really missing.

2) What URL is "Searches -> Web of Science SCI" using?
In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me this 
question, but I do not know what to answer.

3) Can I edit or at least see Web of Science SCI search specs at the XML level?
Is there a way to edit a search once its .bdsksearch file has been installed? I 
looked for plist files, but neither inside the application BibDesk nor in 
~/Library/Application Support could I find the wanted information.

4) Can I look at a SOAP protocol during an attempt to access the ISI WOS 
service?
In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me for the 
exact error message that was returned, but I can not answer that question 
unless I could look at the protocol of a query using SOAP access.

Maybe you Adam or someone else can help me a bit by at least answering some or 
all of these questions.

Thanks!

Cheers,
Andreas



On 07/09/2012, at 18:33 , Maxwell, Adam R wrote:

On Sep 7, 2012, at 08:40, Fischlin Andreas wrote:
In the last few days I have never again been able to successfully search ISI 
WOS. I have checked everything on our side and included personnel from our main 
library at ETH Zurich. Unfortunately all to no avail.

Question 1: Has anyone encountered similar difficulties?

Yes, it appears to be broken.  You can download the WSDL, so the server is 
still alive.

http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve?wsdl

There's apparently a newer version of their WS interface, but I don't have time 
to investigate it right now:

http://search.isiknowledge.com/esti/cxf-wsclient-demo/docs/soap/index.html

It uses separate authentication and searching, from what I can tell at a quick 
glance, even for IP-based auth.  Maybe they've changed auth for the old 
service, too.

Question 2: How about importing from Scopus?   
http://www.library.ethz.ch/en/Resources/Databases/Scopus

I used Scopus several years ago, and adapted BibDesk's RIS parser to deal with 
their bastardized RIS.  That should still work, but I no longer have access to 
Scopus.

If you're asking about a search group for it in BibDesk, that would require a 
suitable API from Scopus, and someone with access to write the code and test 
it.  A web group might be more appropriate, but the same access caveat applies.

Adam


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Re: [Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Maxwell, Adam R]

On Sep 7, 2012, at 08:40, Fischlin Andreas wrote:
> In the last few days I have never again been able to successfully search ISI 
> WOS. I have checked everything on our side and included personnel from our 
> main library at ETH Zurich. Unfortunately all to no avail.
> 
> Question 1: Has anyone encountered similar difficulties?

Yes, it appears to be broken.  You can download the WSDL, so the server is 
still alive.

http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve?wsdl

There's apparently a newer version of their WS interface, but I don't have time 
to investigate it right now:

http://search.isiknowledge.com/esti/cxf-wsclient-demo/docs/soap/index.html

It uses separate authentication and searching, from what I can tell at a quick 
glance, even for IP-based auth.  Maybe they've changed auth for the old 
service, too.

> Question 2: How about importing from Scopus?   
> http://www.library.ethz.ch/en/Resources/Databases/Scopus

I used Scopus several years ago, and adapted BibDesk's RIS parser to deal with 
their bastardized RIS.  That should still work, but I no longer have access to 
Scopus.

If you're asking about a search group for it in BibDesk, that would require a 
suitable API from Scopus, and someone with access to write the code and test 
it.  A web group might be more appropriate, but the same access caveat applies.

Adam


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[Bibdesk-users] All ISI WOS search seems disrupted - How about importing from Scopus?

[Fischlin Andreas]

Hi all,

In the last few days I have never again been able to successfully search ISI 
WOS. I have checked everything on our side and included personnel from our main 
library at ETH Zurich. Unfortunately all to no avail.

Question 1: Has anyone encountered similar difficulties?

Note, the ISI WOS server per se is up and running, which can be checked by 
using the web browser access. But from the perspective of BibDesk it seems to 
be dead. AFAIK it is the SOAP access used by BibDesk that seems not to be 
working. BTW, I have also tried with several "official" versions of BibDesk 
(skipping latest nightlies) and can assure you that all tested BibDesk versions 
show the same problem: They no longer work now, BibDesk versions from which I 
know with 100% certainty that they functioned fine with respect to ISI WOS 
queries in the past.

Given my workflow I am currently under great international pressure to have 
this service up and running again, but fear that may get complicated. Therefore 
my 2nd question:

Question 2: How about importing from Scopus?   
http://www.library.ethz.ch/en/Resources/Databases/Scopus

Has anyone accomplished this with the same convenience as with ISI WOS? I 
learned that Scopus should be becoming more and more competitive with ISI WOS 
and it might in general be worse trying to support searching that service as 
well (http://www.scopus.com/home.url).

Thanks for sharing any experiences, voices, opinions on these two issues.

Regards,
Andreas Fischlin


ETH Zurich
Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischlin
Systems Ecology - Institute of Integrative Biology
CHN E 21.1
Universitaetstrasse 16
8092 Zurich
SWITZERLAND

andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch
www.sysecol.ethz.ch

+41 44 633-6090 phone
+41 44 633-1136 fax
+41 79 595-4050 mobile

 Make it as simple as possible, but distrust it!









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