What is the most efficient way to do this...

jrg · June 11, 2008

Hi
I have thousands of journal articles in .pdf. I intend to create collections complete with info (i.e. author, journal etc.) on each article and link them to the pdf files. Is there an easy way to do this or do I need to search each article online so that zotero can "sense" the relevant info.

Tjowens · June 11, 2008

The short answer is no. Zotero does have the ability to import metadata from PDFs. Searching for them in Zotero compatible catalogs and databases and then importing them might seem tedious but it is probably the most straightforward way to build your collection.

With that noted there are some strategies for getting metadata out of PDFs. If you are interested check out this thread for the full rundown and links to related discussions of the issue.
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3079/

srk · June 16, 2008

You could probably automatically extract relevant information from the PDF files in an automated way using CB2BIB (http://www.molspaces.com/cb2bib), which would give a BibTeX file you could import into Zotero. Linking each entry to the relevant PDF file would probably still need to be done by hand.