Importing Existing Bibliographies from a PDF

Mmandell
I'm working on a project compiling research on existing bibliographies. There are several PDFs online with existing citations that I'd like to be able to add to my library as individual citations. Is there a feature where I can copy/paste individual citations into my Zotero library? I am trying to avoid having to manually input them all (there are hundreds).I am aware that it's possible to import citations from Bibtex or other bib storage sites, but what I'm really looking for is Noodletools' ability to copy and paste a direct citation into the library to manage the citation. Does that exist on Zotero?
  • aurimas
    The best way would be to find the references online and import via URL bar icon (this could be easy if they have hyperlinked DOIs for instance, and less easy by just copy pasting titles into Google search).

    Alternatively, if the citations contain DOIs, you can copy paste the bibliography into "Add by Identifier" tool and that _should_ work, assuming that the DOIs are not broken apart by newlines in the text (or you can copy paste one DOI at a time).

    There is also a new web-based tool that attempts to parse formatted bibliographies, but I can't recall the name right now. Perhaps someone else on the forums knows what I'm talking about.
  • FHeimburger
    Aurimas, you probably mean http://anystyle.io/ - it's good, very good in fact. I'm still not convinced it's actually faster than copying titles from the pdf and sticking them in a google (scholar) search.

    I recently added 1500 references from a pdf to a group library and while it is not the most amusing task, it is definitely feasible (preferably while watching a film or something) using the copy and paste to search method which gives you better and more complete metadata than any parser (URLs, DOIs etc.)
  • aurimas
    Thanks! That's what I had in mind. And yes, I would definitely recommend adding references from publisher websites over anything else (especially if you intend on reading them)
  • zuphilip
    See also https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies
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