Dear Paul,

Agreed the message is confusing, since it may well be that the problem has nothing to do with "not having permission", but rather with not being unable to retrieve results for other reasons as well.

Having encountered similar problems, I was generally more successful while using field tags. Try to search with using field tag title, i.e.

   ti="A new series..."

(replace the ... with the full text you wanted to search), then the confusing message should no longer appear. Please find instructions on query syntax through BibDesk's help page "Help -> BibDesk Help -> Searching External Databases -> Syntax for ISI Searching" link "field tag".

However, note that in my experience the reproducibility of ISI WOS searches may vary, depending which local data base copy you are using and how well the soap service works. Note, ISI WOS is accessed by BibDesk not via the same front-end service as you use when using a browser. I used to have great problems accessing ISI WOS during a few weeks, while browser based access worked fine, for reasons that had nothing to do with BibDesk, but only with internal data base state, as my main library then confirmed. I just made some tests and get the impression that the situation looks currently (here in Switzerland at ETH Zurich) very similar to what it looked at that time, unreliable soap service provided by ISI WOS.

AFAIK the only problem remaining for BibDesk is that BibDesk internally can't distinguish an erreneous query syntax or time-out from having no permission and therefore generates this confusing message. I don't know what exactly happens within BibDesk, but guess that ISI returns some error having been encountered, without telling what the exact cause is (or BibDesk ignores the cases).

My suggestion to developers is to improve at least on the error message (or to distinguish the cases by using different error messages):

*Unable to retrieve results. The query service may be down, your query syntax may be invalid, or you may not have permission to use this database.
*
It may well be above suggestion needs improvements according to what exactly BibDesk is doing internally. Sorry, I don't know the code and have no time to dig into that.

Andreas



Adam M. Goldstein wrote:
This is a question for the list, I am pretty sure.

Adam

Begin forwarded message:

From: Paul Fons <[email protected]>
Date: October 14, 2009 1:53:13 AM EDT
To: "Adam M. Goldstein" <[email protected]>
Subject: Web of Science Access

Thanks for the hard work you have put into Bibdesk. I was hoping I might ask a quick question regarding Web of Science access from Bibdesk. As you can see, I have web of science access without any special proxies (my ip range is valid) as we have a subscription. When I try and use Web of Science from Bibdesk however, a dialog box pops up saying I may not (good work choice!) have access. I can't seem to find any settings dialog box to change or to track down what could be going wrong (nothing in the console). From a browser (safari) I can access the page using apps.isiknowledge.com without trouble. Any ideas of what to try next? I would have filed this as a bug report, but I am not really sure that it is a bug in the first place!


    Cheers,
                Paul







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Adam M. Goldstein PhD, MSLIS
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