No Bibliography from a PDF

phillip.pasteris

Hi Team,

Previous versions of Zotero easily created a bibliography from a downloaded PDF. The PDF is indexed, but won't give me the option. See if you can get this to work and get back to me.https://www.weather.gov/media/owp/oh/hdsc/docs/Atlas14_Volume10.pdf

Thank you!
Phil

tim820

Edit: OK it seems that you mean extract bibliographic metadata about a single PDF. As explained below, that depends heavily on metadata embedded in the PDF by the PDF creator.

(remainder deleted as no longer relevant)

phillip.pasteris

Hi tim820,
Thank you for the reply. I used Zotero extensively about 13 years ago and it seamlessly ingested any .pdf and created a bibliography. To say I was shocked it didn't is an understatement.

As a favor, to verify my observations, could you click on the link in my original message and see if your Zotero configuration supports bibliography creation? It is a really boring NOAA document on precipitation frequency analysis, e.g. what is the 100-year rainfall amount for 24-hours. Nerd stuff.

Thank you,
Phil

dstillman

But what do you mean by "created a bibliography"?

Zotero attempts to retrieve bibliographic metadata for PDFs you add directly. How well that works depends entirely on the PDF.

It doesn't "create a bibliography" — in the sense of creating Zotero items for the citations in the PDF — and never has.

phillip.pasteris

dstillman,

Okay. Clearly I have not done my homework on this application. I will do research on the standard metadata that Zotero use to interpret a PDF.

Phil

phillip.pasteris

dstillman,

Here is a bit of homework still in progress. This YouTube is 9 years old, but this is how I remember Zotero working to find a PDF citation. https://youtu.be/6XuutIJpOko?si=UMu5YlsnXf_zJHbn
I need to do additional work on how Zotero and Google Scholar work together. Almost as challenging as writing FORTRAN programs with punch cards!

Phil

phillip.pasteris

All,

I went into Adobe PDF and there is no metadata for the publication. You would think that a federal document would adhere to some standards to facilitate downstream use. I have to go into Create Parent Item to add the information. Interesting. Thank you both!

Phil