[Feature Idea]: Automatically Import a Paper's References

danialPahlavan
Hi,


Here's an idea I had while going down a research rabbit-hole the other day. When I find a really great review article, I always end up manually looking up every reference in its bibliography.

What if Zotero could help with that?

It would be incredible if, after importing a paper, Zotero could somehow fetch its bibliography and show those cited references as a collection or as linked items under the main paper.

This would make "citation chasing" so much faster. You could immediately see the foundational papers an article is built on, all within Zotero. I know this is probably very difficult to implement because the data might be hard to get, but even if it only worked for some papers, it would be an amazing feature.

Just wanted to share the thought.

Thanks!
  • poettli
    Most recent similar request: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/124564/how-can-i-extract-references-from-papers

  • tim820
    As indicated in the above-linked thread, the Reference plugin can extract both a paper's cited references and also those which have since cited that paper (the latter if that information has been provided by journal publishers to online databases - now common for papers published in recent years).
    https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference

    It can show which references are already in your library (by DOI search). It shows a popup with each cited reference's abstract (also showing how often it has been cited by other papers). You can then easily add any of those new references to your library (to the current or any other collection). It can also take you to the DOI/URL in your browser for those whose PDFs you wish to add to your library. It adds links to new items under Zotero's Related tab.

    Hopefully the github documentation will be updated soon (in languages other than just Chinese) to cover all the current functionality, some of which changed with Zotero v7. But it's not hard to figure out just by playing with it.

    As you indicate, such capabilities is incredibly useful. The above-linked thread suggests they will be added to Zotero itself in the future.
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