Export references from an article's PDF

qodrinzo

Is there a way to export a list of references from PDF file of an item in Zotero?

darkdragon84

That by itself is a non-trivial task, as bibliography styles vary greatly. There is a fairly good machine learning based tool that does that https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid

qodrinzo

Thank you @darkdragon84!

dstillman

See Importing Formatted Bibliographies (specifically the part about AnyStyle).

tim820

The Cita add-on for Zotero is also heading in that direction, but not quite there yet, for the difficult reasons mentioned above (style variation). But it can be made to import references from a compliant PDF now for some reference list styles with the right steps, eg
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Zotero/Cita/Documentation#How_can_I_extract_citations_from_a_PDF_attachment?
https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-cita
You can then copy that list as you wish.

It may also be possible to get the list from Crossref directly if the publisher has deposited it there with an article's main metadata (millions of papers apparently have that reference list data deposited, but not all do). Theoretically Zotero could also potentially extract that list when accessing that main metadata.