Update metadata in bulk

guillaume.dalle

Hi there!
I recently stumbled upon betterbib (https://github.com/nschloe/betterbib), a Python library that can enrich BibTeX files automatically. Using just the title and authors, betterbib can retrieve the rest of the metadata online and format it correctly.
I have long been missing such a feature in Zotero: automatically updating item fields while keeping their citation key and attached files would be pretty great. Do you think developing a betterbib plugin for Zotero would be possible / make sense?

adamsmith

Virtually everything is _possible_ with a plugin and it would certainly be possible to write a plugin that updates/completes metadata (a feature that's also planned in Zotero itself). It probably wouldn't use betterbib, since the hard part is not the metadata lookup (there are a couple of obvious APIs for that that Zotero already supports) but exactly how to merge that information into Zotero, which a bibtex based tool doesn't help with at all.

guillaume.dalle

Yes, you're right, Zotero already supports things like DOI lookup. My main pain point is that you have to enter the DOI / ISBN / etc. yourself, whereas betterbib automatically retrieves it from the title and author names. I agree that going through a .bib file would be a hassle, but a betterbib-like behavior sounds really promising to clean up metadata in bulk

adamsmith

I understand what you're asking for and why it'd be useful -- I'm just saying that the hard part of writing such a tool isn't the look-up (which is what it would take from betterbib) but the merge into the database (where betterbib wouldn't help).

guillaume.dalle

I would like to give it a go at some point, but I never wrote a Zotero plugin, so I'd have to look into the docs. For the merge, I was thinking of a "replace everything unless the lookup failed" paradigm

adamsmith

Start with https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-shortdoi which is closest in functionality (it looks up and adds the DOI based on other information).

guillaume.dalle

Shit it's javascript ^^ I naively thought I could get away with Python since I don't know any web programming language

adamsmith

You could write a python script that interacts with the web API using pyzotero.
A bit more awkward, but saves you from having to interact with the Zotero interface at all.

guillaume.dalle

Thanks, I'll look into that!

dstillman

Note that we have a mostly completed PR for metadata updating and are actively working on it, so I wouldn’t recommend spending time on this until that launches.

guillaume.dalle

Hey there! I just saw the announcement for Zotero 7 (congrats!), and I wanted to check if there are any updates vis-à-vis that PR (https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/1582)?
As an open source dev myself I fully understand that time and resources are limited, so consider this a show of support rather than a demand :)

johnmy

strongly agree