Add attachment from doi or url?

haug
I have a number of records in Zotero which have a doi or URL but don't have the pdf residing at these URLs as an attachment. Is there any way of telling Zotero to download and attach those files for an existing record?

It looks like I need to
1. open the link from the record in the webbrowser
2. use the ZoteroConnector to download the pdf on that page and add it to Zotero (nice feature!)
3. Move the attached pdf from the new record to the old one
4. Delete the new record.

Is this there no better way?
  • adamsmith
    There's a couple of options

    1. You can try "Find available PDF" in the right-click menu of the item: that'd be the fastest.

    2. Instead of your steps 3 & 4, you can just select & merge the two items in Zotero

    3. You can download the PDF regularly on your computer and just drag it to the existing item (or use the "Attach stored copy of file" selection)
  • haug
    Excellent! No. 1 is what I was looking for. I had a vague memory of that feature but couldn't find it. When I check again now, I notice that some records have this option in their right-click menu and others don't (even though all of them have a URL). I don't see the pattern that determines which item has the feature and which one doesn't.

    I do see that once I added a pdf attachment the option disappears, but - obviously - the records where I'm testing this don't have pdfs attached.

    And for those records where I do get the option, Zotero doesn't find any pdf "No pdfs found". Here is the URL of one of these: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681321000665.

    Oh, wait: it looks like it only works when the URL starts with doi.org? The record with the failing URL above does have a DOI in the DOI field, but it still fails...
  • adamsmith
    The feature should be available for all items with a URL or DOI and no attached PDF.

    It fails when Zotero can't find the PDF or isn't able to download it -- are you on campus, i.e. do you have access to the PDF at the URL as shown above? Elsevier/Sciencedirect has a bunch of measures in place to make it harder to get to the PDF, so it's also possible it's failing because of those.
  • haug
    OK, thanks for clarifying.

    I'm not currently on campus, but I connected to the campus net via VPN to see if it changes anything but it doesn't. So I guess it's Elsevier, once again, that's making access unnecessarily difficult. I believe there is a sci-hub plugin that might provide a work-around?
  • dstillman
    Downloading PDFs from ScienceDirect should be fixed now in Zotero 6.0.9.
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