Upgrade StorageMetadata retrieval for PDFs
I have a bunch of PDFs that can't seem to be found by Google Scholar when choosing "Retrieve Metadata for PDF." The PDFs are searchable and have been indexed by Zotero. But I know Google has the entry, because searching for even just the beginning of the title on the Google Scholar webpage finds it.
I'm aware that I can go to the reference's page in my browser, then import the reference, and then drag the pdf to it's parent. But this is an impractical solution for long lists of articles. It can get tedious after a few instances. Therefore, I propose a feature where we can "help" Zotero by giving it clues to the reference.
The workflow I'm envisioning is to be able to choose "Create Parent from Selected Item," and then fill out some fields in the parent, like the Item Type and Title. Then click a button in the pane or select something like "Complete this Entry from Lookup" from the arrow button. Zotero would then use the information I supplied to find the metadata and fill in/complete the fields on the pane, rather than creating a whole new entry.
This feature would be beneficial in two other cases: (1) finding the metadata where the PDF is not searchable/indexable, and (2) finding the correct information in the rare cases where Zotero finds the wrong metadata.
I'm aware that I can go to the reference's page in my browser, then import the reference, and then drag the pdf to it's parent. But this is an impractical solution for long lists of articles. It can get tedious after a few instances. Therefore, I propose a feature where we can "help" Zotero by giving it clues to the reference.
The workflow I'm envisioning is to be able to choose "Create Parent from Selected Item," and then fill out some fields in the parent, like the Item Type and Title. Then click a button in the pane or select something like "Complete this Entry from Lookup" from the arrow button. Zotero would then use the information I supplied to find the metadata and fill in/complete the fields on the pane, rather than creating a whole new entry.
This feature would be beneficial in two other cases: (1) finding the metadata where the PDF is not searchable/indexable, and (2) finding the correct information in the rare cases where Zotero finds the wrong metadata.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/11734/is-there-a-way-to-complete-a-poor-citation/
As ajlyon says in that thread, while desirable, this is not one of the features zotero core devs will likely spend a lot of time on. Two reasons:
1. In the medium run, getting metadata for pdfs is not the way most people will get their data into Zotero and related to that
2. Metadata look-up, especially through google scholar, produces poor data (e.g. no author firstnames, no sentence case titles, misspelled journal names (or journal abbreviations instead of journals) etc.
So yes, while looking up items individually is more work, you'll save the time later on manually fixing up your data.
To be clear again - I'm not saying this wouldn't be nice, I'm just saying this is unlikely to be a priority for core devs. Patches or plugins are always welcome.