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
    edited 6 days ago
    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
    edited 7 days ago
    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
    edited 7 days ago
    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
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