Linking Zotero records to files on computer

seans_potato_biz
I have a folder on my computer in which I keep all the PDFs of journal articles that I may be using in the completion of my own report(s). For each article, I use the pumbed ID number as the file name, and then when I want to find a particular file, I look in Zotero for the name of the article, scroll down the record for the "extra" field and note the number in there which is the pubmed ID and therefore the file name. What would be more useful, is if I could link each entry to the corresponding file. That way, I could avoid most of the hassle of locating the file I want to open.
  • noksagt
    You can already link to files:

    Click the new item (plus symbol) & select "Link to File..."
  • seans_potato_biz
    edited October 5, 2008
    Oh that's pretty good! Zotero, my hero!!

    (thanks for your reply)
  • CB
    Zotero actually does a decent job of making linked files first-class members of its collections, gathering, for example, metadata and full-text indexes for externally linked pdfs. I think this is a good thing (as in general I like to keep files in an application-neutral arrangement).

    One way this could be improved would be by having an option to allow automatically-attached pdfs to be saved to a specified local directory location, instead of necessarily going to the zotero storage dir. As I prefer to use a local dir, I have to untick the automatically-associate option, grab the pdf manually and then link it to a zotero record, which is cumbersome.
  • wednesdaysouth
    In addition to what is said here (and I may be wrong here - happy to be corrected) it seems to me that you can only link a file into a stand alone top level record, and that there is no way to associate bibliographic data with it. Well, you could conceivably have a separate bibliographic record and link to it with a "Related" entry, but this seems overly cumbersome.

    Is there any reason why one cannot create a bibliographic record for stand alone "link to file" records (or notes for that matter)?
  • noksagt
    You can drag a stand-alone attachment to be the child of a reference.
  • wednesdaysouth
    Ah. Silly me. Thanks.
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