DOI, metadata

Hi, Just wanted to check that I am not missing something and that you can not force Zotero to retrieve the DOI of journals as part of the metadata retrieval, this would be a great way to search for articles?
  • Metadata varies depending on what and how you're saving, but Zotero will retrieve a DOI whenever possible. What exactly are you trying to save?
  • We have just recently set up a database so transferred a lot of literature and noticed that in 90% of the cases the DOI isn't filled in, there are some that we used google scholar to find the metadata, is it in these cases it is more likely to find the DOI? We are using the google chrome app to download papers going forward , is it likely to find it then?

    Sorry just trying to understand generally, we have found that title, author and page are ones that are always found
  • I'm still not understanding how exactly you imported the data. What exact steps did you take?

    https://www.zotero.org/support/getting_stuff_into_your_library
  • So the two ways we have added data is
    1. drag and drop, pdf's from. what I understand this is the least efficient way to retrieve metadata, am I correct? In these cases no DOI's were found
    2. Using the Zotero connector via the web browser for example https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.8b01092
    Again this method does not seem to give us DOI

    The 3rd way we have tried is google scholar searching and then using the zotero connector, this did seem to work

  • 1. Depends on the PDF, but yes, generally better to avoid)
    2. The recommendation is to save from article's abstract page, i.e. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.8b01092 which will a) include abstract and DOI and b) automatically attach the PDF (saving from the PDF page is equivalent to 1.

    For your original question, though, you can use the DOI Manager add-on to look up DOIs. Works nicely: https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-shortdoi/releases
  • For standard academic papers with a DOI on the first page, though, you should generally get excellent metadata adding them directly. We'd want to know if that wasn't happening for a particular PDF. If there's no identifier, Zotero can often still extract or retrieve metadata, but there's a greater chance that it won't be as good and you'll want to save the item another way and merge the two items.
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