Can I add metadata to a file myself?

MiraNova
Hi, maybe some one has a similar question. I have about 300 pdf files, for which I could not retrieve metadata. The only option I see now is to manually enter the bibliographic information, which I do not have time to do. Does anyone know if there is a possibility to add metadata to pdf files through a different software and then import them into the zotero library?
Thank you for any suggestions.
  • noksagt
    What kind of files (Journal articles, book chapters, internal reports, something else? New-ish articles or somewhat older? Retrieved online in the past, self-generated or scanned?).

    Zotero's 'retrieve metadata from PDF' extracts identifiers and phrases within the text of a PDF and uses various online tools to try and retrieve information about the paper. If the PDF does not have embedded text or there is not information in these tools about your PDF, it will not work.

    There are third-party tools to perform optical character recognition that can add embedded text to PDFs that lack them. For a limited number of articles, this may be sufficient. Some third-party reference managers also use the embedded metadata in PDFs, if present, to create a bibliographic record. Oftentimes, the quality of that embedded metadata is pretty poor though. In short: yes, other tools handle this differently & you may be able to cut that number down....but it depends on what exactly you have & I doubt that any tool is going to cut 300 unidentified files down to 0.
  • adamsmith
    You can try if this works in Mendeley and then export files _and_ metadata from Mendeley to Zotero.
  • MiraNova
    Thank you for your tips. Mendeley has recognised many of the documents!! So there is no possibility to sync Zotero with Mendeley? Mendeley has this feature.
  • adamsmith
    no, you can't sync, you can only export & import.
  • MiraNova
    ok, thank you.
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