New PDFs not Creating a New Item with metadata

atoelle

Hello, I am new to using Zotero. I have noticed with a lot of scientific literature, when I add the PDF to Zotero it creates a new item with metadata. However, for a lot of PDFs, it just adds a PDF and I have to manually enter the data. Is there a way to increase the chance that Zotero can pull in metadata and create a new item as this would be a huge time saver? Thanks!

dstillman

If you link to some example PDFs that aren't being recognized, we can say more, but a PDF is just a document format — there's no reason to think that any random document necessarily has metadata in a central database that Zotero can retrieve. It works for scientific literature because most scientific literature has DOIs and DOIs have registered metadata.

atoelle

Thank you, I wasn't familiar with how it works. So for PDFs that were scanned in, and therefore wouldn't have any metadata attached, if we added the DOI would it fill in the rest of the information that was registered to that DOI? I know how to manually add a DOI, is there an easier way to do that? Would I have to tell it to search for the information or would it automatically populate?

Thanks for your help!