Automatic relation establishment for PDFs

ojjohnson2

Hi,

I am a new user of Zotero. One of the features that seems powerful in my short period of use so far is the "Related"/"Relations" feature, especially with a my current workflow. However, adding these in manually can quickly become time consuming when some review have nearly 300 individual references.

Is there a plugin that can automatically add these relations by analysing the bibliography of imported PDFs? I've spent a good while looking but haven't had any luck so far

Thanks!

tim820

The Reference plugin can do that. But there are some reasons why it may not work perfectly. It needs to find the paper's reference list from online repositories where journal publishers upload them, and those are not always complete. It then compares the ref list it finds to your library, looking for matches based on DOI (so your library has to have those for all the cited refs). It can be set to Relate those with DOI matches to the current paper.

For cited references you don't have in your library, you can click to get it to take you to their URL so you can download them, via the Zotero web connector.

It can also show you a list of papers that have cited the current paper. And take you to their URLs.

The documentation is somewhat out of date, and in Chinese. You may need to get Google Lens to translate the settings page. But you learn how to use it mostly by using it. It's very powerful.
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference

ojjohnson2

Okay thank you, I will check that out!

ojjohnson2

Thanks for the suggestion @tim820, I checked it out but unfortunately it is having trouble with a lot of my references (i.e. linking every single reference to the same, incorrect, source).
I've had a look with no luck, are you aware of any other plugins with a similar feature set?

Cheers!

tim820

I see you have posted the problem you found under Issues at github. The plugin has had quite a few changes recently so hopefully the issue will be resolved soon.
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference/issues/367

I don't know of any other plugin that relates the current paper to all the papers it cites that are in your library. What may reasonably seem to a new Zotero user like obvious functionality - extracting a paper's reference list, and also papers that cite the current paper - it is actually still quite hard to achieve, and therefore rather novel. For a long time journal publishers resisted posting their journal's reference lists to open online repositories. And coverage is still somewhat inconsistent (eg one online database may return a different number of cited references to another database).

I think Zotero should eventually incorporate similar cited/cited-by functionality. Until then I can't see another plugin doing something similar. The Cita plugin did have some overlap (although not for Related AFAIK), but its aims and methods were somewhat different. I am not sure where its long, ongoing development is at now.
https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-cita

I also think there are outstanding issues around the exact purpose of "Related" in Zotero. As of now, users can utilize it however they see fit. It is a multi-purpose "hold-all" that would perhaps benefit from a narrower, or just a different purpose. It's an important feature, but once you start to use it you realize that it's hard to use in any consistent and thorough way. For a given paper, should Related hold all cited references in your library (as you can achieve by manually adding papers to it, or letting the Reference plugin do that for you) ? Or just the papers that are *really* important to understanding the current paper ? Should it also include other papers that you deem to to be related to the current one, even though they are not cited/cited-by ? Could it also include other papers by (one or more of) the current paper's authors, or the same lab/research group ?

To resolve some of that ambiguity, I would be good to see Zotero adding dedicated (Cited) References and Cited-By sections in the right pane. And then leaving Related for *other* papers that don't fall into those two categories. The Reference plugin does more or less allow you to do that now - with its dedicated lists for those two categories, with highlighting of cited/cited-by papers you do/don't have in your library (when that works ;) ).