How to migrate from Papers 3.0 to Zotero

ono2000
Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere, I couldn't find it...
I'd like to move my 1050 PDFs from Papers 3.0 (Mac) to Zotero in the simplest way possible.

It seems from reading the forums that syncing with WebDAV or Dropbox would make sense (I already have my Papers library in Dropbox).

Is there an easy way to do this without having to relink all of the papers individually?

Thanks for your help!
Andrew
  • adamsmith
    Probably exporting from papers as RIS and importing into Zotero works best. Tries this with a couple of items and see if it works - it may require some tweaking (or it may just work out of the box - depends on the RIS export by papers)
    As for now, linked papers would be automatically imported into Zotero's storage folder - from where you could use webDAV sync. You can not just leave them where they are and link to them.
  • mbxx
    Result from a first try ...
    RIS export / import in general works with bib data and PDFs but it seems not to work with highlights/underlines made in Papers.
  • adamsmith
    yes, I'd be surprised if you were able to get these transferred, unfortunately. Either they're written to the file, in which case they would have transferred, or they're in a custom annotation format - I know that's what Mendeley uses and I assume that's also the case for Papers.
  • bkutner
    I'm interested in importing annotations (notes and highlights) from Papers into Zotero, since Papers 3 just doesn't work very well. Has there been an update to Zotero to allow import of annotations from Papers?
  • adamsmith
    no, same thing I said in May. If Papers doesn't export those notes, we can't import them, sorry. If you find a way to export them, they will either already import or we can make that happen.
  • bkutner
    Thanks, Adam. I know it's possible to export a PDF from Papers as PDF with annotations, and open that PDF in Preview on a Mac. All of the highlights and notes show up. I can then import that PDF into Zotero and the highlights and notes show up there too. Granted, the highlights don't show up nicely in a sidebar as they do in Papers 2, but they still show up.

    I can also export a .txt file of Notes that contain all of the highlighted text and notes by page number.

    I've tried importing these into Mendeley but the highlights disappear. Is there a way then to make the highlights and notes appear, per your comment above?
  • adamsmith

    Thanks, Adam. I know it's possible to export a PDF from Papers as PDF with annotations, and open that PDF in Preview on a Mac. All of the highlights and notes show up. I can then import that PDF into Zotero and the highlights and notes show up there too. Granted, the highlights don't show up nicely in a sidebar as they do in Papers 2, but they still show up.
    Do that, install Zotfile:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zotfile/versions/ (strongly recommend installing version 4.0, even though it's not yet reviewed by mozilla), run "extract annotations" and you'll get a single note per item with all your annotations/notes from the PDF.

    Note that this requires that your PDFs are attached to Zotero items (which would hopefully be the case when you import from papers).
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