Current Version of Zotero Connector

Scotthertzberg · June 2, 2020

Does anyone know the current version of the Connector for Chrome. I have version 5.0.67. Does the extension automatically update? I can't save citations from PDFs. Maybe the newer versions can.

dstillman · June 2, 2020

All browser extensions automatically update. The latest version is 5.0.68, which was released this morning and which you should have in a few hours if you don't yet.

There were no changes to saving. I'm not sure what "save citations from PDFs" means, though, so you'd have to say more. For saving problems in general, see Troubleshooting Translator Errors.

Scotthertzberg · June 8, 2020

Thank you for responding and sorry for not asking a clear question. By "saving citations from PDFs" I mean collecting (in other words, importing into Z) bibliographic information on a PDF (title, author, etc) with the Zotero Connector. In my experience, the Z Connector works very will with webpages but not with PDFs.

I am working on a project at the library where I need to convert scores of journal article web addresses into complete Chicago citations. A lot of the web addresses are PDFs. Sometimes there is an html page with the same bibliographic information, essentially a webpage about a publication that links to the PDF. There is not always a webpage as an alternative to the PDF. If I am missing something and the Zotero Connector works on PDFs that would be the gift of the day. Thanks.

dstillman · June 8, 2020

It's still not clear to me exactly what you're experiencing.

If you're viewing a PDF directly, you can always save it directly to Zotero using the Zotero Connector save button. Whether Zotero — not the Zotero Connector — can retrieve metadata for it depends on the PDF. Most academic PDFs should work. See Retrieve PDF Metadata for more on that. If there's something that doesn't work that you would expect to work, we'd need an example URL.

But for saving journal articles, you should always save from the article page rather than the PDF when possible. It's pretty rare for a journal article from a mainstream publisher to not have an article page.