match function (like in Papers)

ben.hurlbut

I use zotero extensively, but have also been using Papers a little recently. Zotero is better for me for many reasons, but Papers has a few advantages. One is its "match" function. When it cannot retreat metadata on its own, it lets you "match"-- i.e. run a search by article title, etc, and identify the citation in e.g. google scholar for it. Then it makes a new entry and links it with the PDF.

In zotero, you can sort of do the same thing, but it is much more time consuming. Run a google scholar search, import the citation, scroll down to find the pdf, drag it up to the citation to attach. 30 seconds instead of 10. It would be great if zotero autonmated this more. A "find citation manually" function for imported PDFs.

I find that zotero (and Papers) frequently have a hard time with metadata for various kinds of articles, for instance articles from Nature. A feature of this sort would speed up the importation process dramatically.

adamsmith

This sound nice, though not easy to implement, given the absence of a search mask in Zotero. So more specifically, how would you see this working?

Stepping back a little - why would this come up frequently? I understand people importing their old pdfs use the feature, but once you've used Zotero for a while, why do you still have pdfs of journal articles without metadata?

ben.hurlbut

I can't comment on what it would take to implement on a technical level. I do think it would be useful. It is not at all rare in my experience that zotero is unable to retrieve metadata (it often dhas trouble with certain journals, including Nature), and periodically it gets it wrong. In addition, sometimes I import scanned PDFs that zotero can't read, an I have to match by hand. Doing this is tedious in zotero. It takes multiple steps and a bit of time.

If you could, for instance, copy the title from within the pdf, paste it into a search field in zotero (with an associated menu where you specific what you've pasted-- title, author, keyword, whatever), have zotero then consult google scholar or similar, offer you a list of results, you click on the correct result, and it creates a new item with that bibliographic information and attaches your PDF to it, all in a single step, it would save a lot of work.

The match function is the one thing that Papers does much much better than zotero.

adamsmith

my point about usage was - why do you use the retrieve metadata feature a lot? Zotero imports papers from Nature (and most other sources) with pdfs - getting the pdf, then using retrieve metadata to get lower quality data (e.g. google scholar only ever supplies initials) seems like a very inefficient way of using this - the idea is that the main way of getting data into Zotero would be translators.

ben.hurlbut

I often am sent PDFs by collaborators, etc, which I drop into my zotero library. Importing as you suggest is indeed very useful, but its not the only, nor even the primary, way I (and many others) acquire and file PDFs. The metadata function made zotero hugely more useful for me. A "match" function could improve it further. Good functionality in one area doesn't preclude improvements in another.

adamsmith

no, of course not - it's just that we often find that people aren't fully aware of what Zotero can do and how it works and I wanted to make sure there aren't any misunderstandings that kept you from using its full functionality.

As I say above, it certainly sounds like a nice feature. My (completely unofficial) sense is that - unless a third party develops a patch or a plugin - this won't happen anytime soon, though.