Problem with meta data retreiving

JeannelleN
Good morning everyone,

I'm a user of Zotero software which is very useful and user-friendly for make a library of paper. I'm using the "Retrieve PDF Metadata" function quite a lot but I have a query.

I try to import many Journal articles from a conference. All acticle are on distinct PDF files, but here every article have on their front-page the following heading:
- Frontiers in Offshore Geotechnics II – Gourvenec & White (eds)
© 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-415-58480-7

So the metadata taken for each PDF are the metadata of the whole book and not the specific article, for instance :
Recommended best practice for geotechnical site characterisation
of cohesive offshore sediments

Is it possible to overpass the reading of ISBN number during metadata retrieval ?

Best regards, Nicolas
  • aurimas
    no, not possible. Could you link to the articles in question if they are available online?
  • JeannelleN
    aurimas, thx for your quick answer

    I have this link :
    http://www.crcnetbase.com/doi/abs/10.1201/b10132-4

    The problem is that is have ~150 articles of this conference "Frontiers in Offshore geotechnics" and after retrieving the PDF metadata, all article have the same parent item. I'm now with ~150 duplicate items which obviously aren't.

    Nicolas,
  • bwiernik
    To fix that issue, the fastest way is to merge all of the "duplicate" items, then select all of the attachments and drag them to an open spot in your library window. This will dissociate the attachments from the parent item, just like they were before you used Retrieve Metadata.
  • aurimas
    It's unfortunate that the PDFs do not include a DOI that seems to be assigned to each "chapter" (as listed on the page you linked to). Zotero always prefers DOIs to ISBN, so that would solve the issue. Lacking that, I don't see a great _general_ approach how to not misidentify these PDFs _and_ maintain high quality of metadata (searching by PDF content generally yields much poorer metadata than DOI or ISBN).

    One solution that I know will not sit well with all developers here is to give options for which pieces of metadata to use during lookups. The issue with that is mostly because Zotero currently auto-starts retrieval resulting in a single-click lookup (after right-clicking the PDF). The solution would add additional clicks with no benefit for the majority of the users.
  • JeannelleN
    Hi bwiernik, Hi aurimas,

    Thak for your answers. Since so far, I just input all these papers with the uncorrect matadata and I change manually the metadata of a paper every time I need to reference it in a bibliography in Word.

    This may be not the best solution as this is time-consuming to find the good paper every time, but this is the best I've found.

    Best Regards,
    Nicolas

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