Pull bibliographic Information from a journal article's bibliography into Zotero

vschmidt · July 15, 2014

I've a feature request!

I'd like to be able to select a journal article (say in PDF form), click a button and have Zotero automatically
1)find the article's bibliography at the end
2) systematically search each entry
3) pull the record into my Zotero database
4) Retrieve PDF sources when they are available.
Thanks,
Val

HLHJ · July 27, 2014

Sounds nice :) .

If the PDF is clean and the bibliographic entries have DOIs, stages 1-3 should be possible. Unfortunately automated mass downloads are frowned upon by many publishers; they might block you. So you would probably have to do the downloads manually.

A tool to extract *all* DOIs from a pdf and make a new Zotero entry for each of them if it doesn't already exist seems feasible. A tickbox menu, like for downloading multiple objects from a bibliography on a website, would be nice (there are probably a few cited papers you could do without).

In the meantime, a workaround might be:
1. cut-and-paste the bibliography into a text file
2. save that file on your computer
3. use File>Open to open the file in your browser
4. download the lot to Zotero as usual

I haven't tried this; if you do, please let us know if it works!

aurimas · July 27, 2014

You can copy-paste DOIs into the Add by identifier tool. They can also have text in between and you can paste multiple lines at a time. Never tested this with bibliographies, but it might work well. Zotero may interpret some random numbers as PMID though.

But yes, we currently can't automatically retrieve PDFs. Idk if it would be a huge issue in terms of mass download. For a typical case we're not talking about hundreds of PDFs from a single website. Likely 20 or so from various publishers. Of course this could be abused, but I feel like that's up to the user.