I cannot find a use for Zotero.

glen.whitehead
My Zotero installs:

Stand-alone on Mac
Plugin for FireFox
Plugin for Safari
Plugin for MS Word and LibreOffice

My view of Zotero:

Button in FireFox - click this to open Zotero stand-alone
Address bar icon in FireFox - activates for BBC News, but not for Journals for PDFs
Button in Safari - clone of address bar icon in FireFox

My Experience:

Take for example a PDF found with the help of a web-search (at least 99% of my sources are PDFs) ..

1) Observe greyed-out Zotero icons
2) Use browser "save as..." to store PDF locally.
3) Drag into Zotero and see many blank fields.
4) Hit refresh and sync icons in Zotero, open/close Zotero, pray, cry...
5) Search on Google scholar for citation and manually copy the long title, long list of author names.. *yawn*
6) Observe different button while on Google scholar!
7) Press button, read dialog, save article to Zotero..
8) Open Zotero (or view library online) and observe nothing is saved!

How do I get Zotero to update metadata <i>automatically</i>?
  • aurimas
    Save metadata from abstract pages, not PDF pages. E.g. http://www.nature.com/emi/journal/v3/n12/full/emi201488a.html

    If you found a PDF, you can add it to Zotero (drag-drop), then right-click retrieve metadata.

    Keep Zotero Standalone open while saving from Safari (otherwise it saves to server and you have to sync) or, if working with firefox, make sure that Zotero Standalone and Zotero in Firefox share data directory to avoid confusion.
  • adamsmith
    1) Zotero works best if you use the URL bar icon. For most journals, it will automatically attach the PDF if you have access. You can try this e.g. here to see how it works in general:
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2568856/

    2) If you really do want to use the PDF, drag it to Zotero and use right-click --> Retrieve Metadata (but this will get your worse results and won't work all the time).

    3) If using google scholar doesn't work in the way you describe, that either means there's a problem (e.g. if you don't allow cookies) or you're running two separate versions of Zotero to different profiles.

    4) Sync has nothing to do with any of this.

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