How to turn Attachments into parent files that I can cite?

hellothere123

I uploaded a bunch of documents into Zotero (all pdfs) and they are all listed as an "Attachment" under item type. From what I've understood, it looks like you can't cite an attachment. So, how do I turn all of these attachments into parent files that I can actually cite?

adamsmith

I think you're still misunderstanding -- in technical terms, you would cite the item the PDFs are attached to, not the PDF itself, and that already seems to be the case. Or are you saying all the PDFs are attached to one single parent item?

dstillman

I think @hellothere123 just has a bunch of standalone PDF attachments that metadata couldn't be detected for, and so the PDFs weren't placed under parent items.

@hellothere123, Zotero will automatically detect metadata for most academic PDFs and create parent items, but for random other documents you'll need to either save from an online source using the Zotero Connector and drag the PDF on top of the new item or, if there's no online source that Zotero can get high-quality metadata from, right-click on the attachment, choose Create Parent Item, and enter metadata manually. For academic publications, the latter is rarely necessary.

Read through Adding Items to Zotero to make sure you understand the basic recommend workflows in Zotero.