Automated Association of files with Bibliographic Entries?

timtak

I have quite a lot of pdf files. Sometimes I can get the meta data from the pdf but often I can not. So, instead, I get the bibliographic "item" from Google scholar. Is there a way of searching a drive for the files that correspond to the bibliographic items, and associating them within Zotero by copying file, or adding a link to the file?

I doubt it, but just in case, it would help me.

I think that a lot of zotero are at good database providing universities where they can get pdfs from places like Jstor or APA. I do not have access to these repositories and have got my pdfs from author websites and course readings repositories etc. Hence my bibliographic information from google, and my files from the WWW, come from difference sources. So this functionality, to associate the bibligraphy with the files, would only be useful to outlier "researchers" like me.

adamsmith

I have quite a lot of pdf files. Sometimes I can get the meta data from the pdf but often I can not. So, instead, I get the bibliographic "item" from Google scholar. Is there a way of searching a drive for the files that correspond to the bibliographic items, and associating them within Zotero by copying file, or adding a link to the file?

nope. Would also be exceedingly hard to do, so it likely won't happen.

mronkko

There is no such feature. The problem is that when "retrieve metadata" does not identify a PDF, it is likely that the PDF does not contain any information that Zotero could use to identify it.

Also you can do what you request by just doing the following:
-Drop all PDFs on Zotero
-Retrieve metadata for all of them
-Delete the ones that you did not find metadata for
-Remove duplicates

timtak

mronko!
Thank you. I did not even know we could drag to Zotero.
I just dragged 17 pdfs and have selected them all and am having their data retrieved. Wow. So far every single one has been meta data-retrieved.

There were a couple that were OCRed that could not be retrieved.

Zotero is so cool. I think I am in love.

Dear Mr. Smith
Thank you for your un-ending, unpaid, but always immediate support. I am grateful for the fact that you are always here for Zotero users. If I were god I would insist upon your getting a share of Zotero sync server revenue.