pdf metadata extraction for existing entries

northsun

I imported my publication-collection from Mendeley. Mendeley has the function that it automatically indexes pdfs that are copied to some specified folders (that would also be a nice feature in Zotero, but that is not the point here), and tries to extract the reference data from the pdfs. However, Mendeley does a poor job at that, so in my Zotero collection imported from Mendeley I have a lot of entries with rubbish reference data. I would like to have a go with the Zotero-pdf-data-extraction, however, this option seems only available when you drag and drop a pdf file into Zotero. So my question is:

Is there a way to apply the Zotero-pdf-extraction to pdf-files that already connected with an entry with reference data?

If this is not possible this post should be moved to the feature request category.

zuphilip

You may want to have a look at ZotFile ( http://zotfile.com/ ) for more functionalities with Zotero and PDFs.

If the metadata from Mendeley is poor, then maybe you just want to include the pdfs into Zotero. Moreover, it is possible in Zotero to move a pdf from an attachement of an entry to its own entry (this looks the same as when you just drag&drop a pdf into Zotero). Then you can extract metadata and either delete the old entry or merge with it.

adamsmith

but ZotFile wouldn't help to re-fetch metadata for already attached PDFs. While we are planning to add support for refetching metadata e.g. from a title or a DOI, I don't think we'll add this for getting the data for PDFs, that makes little sense in most circumstances.

zuphilip

Yes, I was refering to ZotFile because of its functionalities to "watch a folder".