citation information not available for some articles

rachel.strickman

I use Zotero only to manage my peer-reviewed article collection and generate bibilographies. In order to do this, I use the Zotero add-in for Word, enter the reference as necessary, then generate the bibliography. Great tool and saves me tons of time! My problem however is that quite a few of my references just can't be "entered" properly to Zotero's citation management system. When I right-click the PDF and to "retrieve metadata for PDF", which is the only way I know of to get the citation information into Zotero, some files say "PDF does not contain OCR'd text" and others say "no matching references found". Then, when I try to add the article to either the in text citations of my writing or to the bibliography, Zotero only shows the articles that do have all the metadata, so I have to go back and enter that particular paper by hand. This gets very time consuming especially when changing reference formats.

There are not hundreds of these problems-- it occurs mostly with older papers. It also sometimes occurs with newer papers though. I am willing to enter the metadata/citation information to these papers to Zotero by hand, if only I can figure out how!

Apologies if I'm not using the right terms or this question has been answered before. Most threads here seem very technical so I hope this question benefits some others as well.

bwiernik

Retrieving metadata from PDFs is rarely the best way to add items to your library. You generally want to use the Zotero browser plugin to import items:
https://www.zotero.org/support/getting_stuff_into_your_library

This will typically yield much better metadata than the Retrieve Metadata from PDF function.

If you already have a PDF and would like to enter its metadata manually, you can right click on it and choose Create Parent Item, then change the type to an appropriate one and enter the metadata.

rachel.strickman

Thank you so much Bwiernik! I've managed to sort out my "problem" references and have now streamlined how I get new items into Zotero. A lot has changed since I first taught myself how to use this citation manager five years ago, definitely for the better!

rachel.strickman

Hello Zotero Community,

I have another Chrome Extension update, that I hope will be useful to others. Although the extension worked well for several days, it then stopped importing PDFs. The small window in the lower right hand side of the screen indicated that the upload is proceeding correctly; but then when I looked in the folder in Zotero Standalone, I could not find the file. Restarting the computer, browser, and Zotero did not help. However, the obvious fix of checking for updates under Help-> Check for Updates, and installing the new version, fixed the problem.

I realize that this is a very simplistic issue (and fix) but I hope it will be useful to someone else searching for reasons why Zotero seems to miss PDFs/will not import PDFs from Chrome.