Automatic data retrieval when inserting citations

mr_podolsky

Dear devs,
Sometimes I need to insert citations on articles that are not in Zotero library. And I know only the title and first author's name. Is it possible to find the absent articles in external databases like Google Scholar and then fill the whole bibliograthy?

DWL-SDCA

I'm not a developer and this will not answer all of your questions. For things that are in your Zotero library, how did they get there? You can follow the same steps to add the desired but missing items.

If you know the exact title, place it within quotes and perform a regular Google search. Unless the title has been used for several articles you should find a link to the item on the publisher's website. The publisher's metadata will almost be better than that of Google Scholar. Indeed, if tou identify an item via Google Scholar it is almost always best to follow the link to the publisher's site before you fetch the metadata.

dstillman

mr_podolsky: It sounds like you might not be entirely clear on how Zotero works, so I'd start with Getting Stuff Into Your Library.

aurimas

I took mr_podolsky's comment as a feature suggestion. Personally, I like the idea of being able to quickly import a publication based on some keywords directly from the Word document. Google scholar is a good database for this, but the metadata is very poor. This will probably be less of an issue once we have support for automatic metadata updating. In the mean time we could offer such functionality through PubMed, though that would only cover life sciences.

In any case, such feature would take some time to implement.

mr_podolsky

Thank you for your answers. Actually I've read a lot of documentation. I'll try to explain in another words. If I'd like to add citation and corresponding bibliography I need to (for instance):
1. add journal article
2. type the title and first author's name
3. press lookup engines like Google Scholar
4. press the button on the site to add the detailed info
5. type in Zotero Insert Citation pane the article of interest
6. find it in the list of Zotero library items, though, as usual, it would be only one
It would be great if I can just type the title and name of the first author, then click something like "No results, try to find the metadata in Google Scholar?". Perhaps even without adding the item in Zotero library.