Upgrade StorageDBLP and/or Citation Insertion
I have been trying to index a series of pdf's downloaded to my hard drive. Two observations:
a) Zotero will not find the citation info for some pdf's even though the citation info exists on both DBLP and CiteseerX. I have the translators and the lookup engines are Google Scholar and Pubget. There is no 'add' feature so I can't add lookup engines and apparently DBLP and CiteseerX are not being accessed; and
b) When I manually obtain the citation information (cut/paste from DBLP say), how do I insert that information in to the pdf item in Zotero? When there is a DOI, no problem creating a whole new entry, but when there isn't ...?
Any useful guidance would be appreciated. Cheers.
a) Zotero will not find the citation info for some pdf's even though the citation info exists on both DBLP and CiteseerX. I have the translators and the lookup engines are Google Scholar and Pubget. There is no 'add' feature so I can't add lookup engines and apparently DBLP and CiteseerX are not being accessed; and
b) When I manually obtain the citation information (cut/paste from DBLP say), how do I insert that information in to the pdf item in Zotero? When there is a DOI, no problem creating a whole new entry, but when there isn't ...?
Any useful guidance would be appreciated. Cheers.
PDFs metadata is found using google scholar via full-text and CrossRef via DOIs. I can't say why a particular PDF isn't found w/o an example
b) Ideally you'd just import the data from, say dblp via the URL bar icon and then attach the PDF. If, for whatever reason that's not possible, right-click the PDF and select "Create Parent Item"
"http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.125.7436"
Go to citeseer, download pdf. It's a preprint of an article of the same name, so I thought that based on the metadata, zotero would find either the Citeseerx bibtex OR the DBLP bibtex which refers to the published article in Pattern Recognition. It finds neither. Instead I cut/paste the DOI info, do "add item by identifier", and drag pdf into item. Kludgy and time-consuming though leaps better than hand entry. But it begs the question, why wasn't the available info found or how might I just cut/paste the bibtex info in to a new entry?
The main way to get data into Zotero is by using the URL bar icon:
http://www.zotero.org/support/getting_stuff_into_your_library#web_translators
that works on the citeseerx site you link to and downloads the metadata with the PDF attached.
As I say above, finding data for PDFs won't always work and it's not intended as the main way to get data into Zotero. In this case the problem seems to be that the text contains a lot of formulas, which are hard to search for. PDFs do not typically contain metadata - Zotero uses google scholar searches to associate them with metadata.
If that doesn't answer your question, you'll need to take a step back and describe what you're trying to do - I'm still not entirely sure I understand.
So far: I have been able to drag/drop up to 100 files at a time into Zotero which indexes them automatically and allows me to create .bib files in less time than it takes me to hand create ten .bib entries from scratch. Impressive.
Challenges: sometimes the pdf is a journal article for which zotero can't automatically find the bib info. A few times I have been able to locate the desired info in DBLP and so was wondering why Zotero could not find the info. Note: with current journal articles, there is no problem, as you point out, since it is url driven.
Current Situation: zotero has automated >95% of the work. I guess I can do the remaining 5% manually.
Thank you for the assistance.
You could work with the beta,
http://www.zotero.org/support/4.0
which is about to be released anyway and has some improvements in PDF recognition, though I wouldn't expect miracles.