Can Export create a .ris file from the .pdf?

brodders

Hi,

In Zotero Standalone, when I select a .pdf document and then export as .ris, the output file is created but is empty.

Now most of my work concerns industry documents not scholarly papers; they just don't exist on Google Scholar.

Yet Z scrapes the .pdf for lots of data - so I assumed it had got the needed meta data from the .pdf.

That not so? Has something gone wrong? How do I create a .ris file (..for about 1400 docs) given that Z knows about the document?

Q: Why do I want to export to .ris?
A: a long time ago I wrote my own clunky but powerful paper management system - which eats .ris files. I'd like to keep the two in sync.

Thanks! :)

adamsmith

If you just have the PDF in Zotero -- not attached to any item holding metadata -- Zotero doesn't, in fact, know anything about the item and thus can't export anything. What do you mean by "lots of data"? What type of data are you seeing?

noksagt

No: Zotero does not associate bibliographic metadata with stand-alone notes or stand-alone attachments such as the PDFs. You need to have a parent zotero item that contains this metadata.

Zotero can try to retrieve metadata for the PDFs, though industry reports are less likely to have DOIs or be indexed by Google Scholar or the other databases that Zotero uses when trying to locate metadata for a document.

You may right click on the pane & try to find this anyway or can just select "create parent item..." and self-populate it.