Auto generation of bibliographic information from pdf metadata

esetlamm
One of the best features in Zotero is the ability to drag-and-drop a pdf of a journal article into Zotero, and Zotero pulls the bibliographic data from the pdf and develops a citation suitable for use in writing. Recently, this functionality stopped working for me. Now when I drag-and-drop, the pdf lands in Zotero but the bibliographic information (author, title, date, volume, issue, journal, pages) is not auto-created. I have also tried the "Create Bibliography from item . . . " drop down menu option, which yields a message that states "Error: The items you have selected contain no references. Please select one or more references and try again."

Now, I am pretty certain that the items (pdf) I selected have bibliographic data in them. They were downloaded from major publishers (Elsevier) and have worked for this purpose in the past.

I am running Zotero 5.0.66 on macOS 10.14.3. Below is an example of one of the articles I was trying to load into my Zotero database:

https://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2069/science/article/pii/S0014488615000345

Thanks in advance for your help!
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited May 2, 2019
    Lets be sure that we are discussing the same article. Here is a non-proxy link:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014488615000345

    That seems to be an open access article. I can get the PDF file and metadata from the pdf either with my university proxy or without going through a proxy. Remember that the best way to get full article metadata is to view the web version via your browser and to click on the Zotero download-article icon. The metadata will flow into your library.

    edit: Is "Automatically retrieve metadata for PDFs" ticked in your Zotero Preferences General control box?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Right, as DWL says, saving from the ScienceDirect article page should work and is the recommend approach. But Zotero should also successfully retrieve metadata for the PDF and create a parent item as long as that setting is on, and does for me.

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