[CLOSED] Disable source URL saving for downloaded material.

edited June 20, 2017
When I download an article as a PDF, Zotero automatically saves where it was downloaded from (URL).
I don't want this, since I think it's not useful and it's a potential privacy issue if I want to share my database with someone else. URLs change over the years and in my opinion it's a pretty irrelevant information (given that google exist). If I need to re-download the material in 4 years from now I would look it up again anyway. (If I'm saving a website, of course the URL is relevant, I'm talking about downloadable elements like PDFs)

How do I disable the saving of the URL?
  • You can't, sorry. (I mean -- technically you can by modifying the import script for every single site you're importing from, but given that there are hundreds of those, in practical terms that means you can't.) I don't think this is a common enough request to pref it.

    FWIW, many citation styles still do want the URL, which is one reason to save it. Zotero also uses the field to determine if something is an online resource when citing it.
  • Thanks for your reply.

    Just to be sure we're talking about the same thing: when I import an article which has an available PDF associated, the item in my Zotero collection has two components: the article (parent) item, and the (full text) PDF.

    The parent item has all the associated information like Title, Authors, etc. including DOI and URL. That's fine because, as you said, many citation styles require URL or DOI to be included in the references list. This can be seen in the "Info" tab of the parent item.

    But when I select the PDF, I see information on the PDF file itself, including URL (which is a different URL information than that stored for the parent item).

    The latter is the one I would like to avoid being stored.
  • ah, I didn't understand that, but no, there's no way to prevent that, sorry.
  • Not automatic, but you can do Show File, drag the PDF back into Zotero as an attached file (without a URL), and then delete the attachment with the URL.
  • Thanks! Good enough for me. Appreciated
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