Extract bibliographic data from Dropbox collection?

eshields · February 20, 2014

I am a librarian working with a professor and his graduate assistant. The professor has a large library of documents stored in Dropbox. He has never used a citation manager, but he would like to start. I recommended Zotero. The GRA is supposed to find a way to store the bibliographic information from the collection in Dropbox in Zotero. The professor has shared several Dropbox folders with the student.

We have been unable to find a way to do this. I see a lot about syncing files, but I haven't seen anything about pulling bibliographic data out of Dropbox. Can anyone help us?

adamsmith · February 20, 2014

There is no bibliographic data on Dropbox if I understand you correctly, just a large number of files so there's no data to pull, but what you want to look at is this:
http://zotero-manual.github.io/zotero-manual/adding-items#retrieve_metadata_for_pdfs

You will want to work with the beta version of Zotero
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev_builds#zotero_40_beta
or wait for the 4.0.18 release when doing this, though. With the current version the google scholar lock-outs will make this rather unworkable for a large collection.