How to configure Zotero to retrieve Publication’s PDF from Sci-Hub automatically

Sci-Hub + Zotero = ❤PDF❤

Zotero try to download the PDF of any publications you add to your collection. But, a lot of publications are behind paywall. Zotero can not download those publication automatically as access are blocked.

SAGE, I do want to Full Text. Ok?

Let’s configure Zotero so when a publications is not publicly available we use sci-hub to download it anyway automatically. To do that, we are going to add a custom PDF resolver. Don’t worry, it’s actually pretty simple and certainly illegal in most country (but we will use a secure connection, so nobody can know what you download from sci-hub).

You just have to follow those few steps:

Open the preferences

2. Open the Config Editor (say yes when it ask to be cautious)

3. Find the extensions.zotero.findPDFs.resolvers , right click and select Modify (if you don’t know how to do a right click, you can also double click).

4. In the text input, copy&past the following code (the text input should be empty or only have ‘[]’ that you can safely delete before pasting this code):

Done. No need to restart Zotero.

Now when you add a publication from the browser plugin or directly from Zotero, it will always try to get the PDF from sci-hub when other resolver fail.

Their you go! Thanks sci-hub.

Yeah!

Notes:

I’m using the https://sci-hub.se domain as it is the only domain that do work properly trough a SSL connection right now. It may change in the future. If it breaks just tweet me and I will update the code accordingly.

Sometimes sci-hub display a captcha. In this case this method will fail as Zotero can not show up the captcha to you. The captcha seem IP based, downloading a paper once using sci-hub.se with your standard browser should solve the problem.

If you are in police state like UK, , perhaps https://sci-hub.se is blocked. In this case you need to use https://www.torproject.org or a VPN.

Last if you don’t know who is Alexandra Elbakyan, go check it.