Export references from an article's PDF

qodrinzo · January 17, 2023

Is there a way to export a list of references from PDF file of an item in Zotero?

darkdragon84 · January 17, 2023

That by itself is a non-trivial task, as bibliography styles vary greatly. There is a fairly good machine learning based tool that does that https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid

qodrinzo · January 17, 2023

Thank you @darkdragon84!

dstillman · January 17, 2023

See Importing Formatted Bibliographies (specifically the part about AnyStyle).

tim820 · January 18, 2023

The Cita add-on for Zotero is also heading in that direction, but not quite there yet, for the difficult reasons mentioned above (style variation). But it can be made to import references from a compliant PDF now for some reference list styles with the right steps, eg
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Zotero/Cita/Documentation#How_can_I_extract_citations_from_a_PDF_attachment?
https://github.com/diegodlh/zotero-cita
You can then copy that list as you wish.

It may also be possible to get the list from Crossref directly if the publisher has deposited it there with an article's main metadata (millions of papers apparently have that reference list data deposited, but not all do). Theoretically Zotero could also potentially extract that list when accessing that main metadata.

diegodlh · April 25, 2023

You may be interested in a reference extraction workshop that will be held in Frankfurt on May 15 and 16: https://mpilhlt.github.io/reference-extraction/

@dominic-d and I plan to present on how to integrate Cita with reference extraction workflows there: https://mpilhlt.github.io/reference-extraction/workshop-2023/programme/

tim820 · April 26, 2023

Thanks @diegodlh.

I am not sure if any of the workshop organizers are active here, but the other recent player in this space that they may wish to to cover is:
https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference

It is still under development, but has both PDF citations text extraction and citations database API-based retrieval, that work quite well. It can also show which cited references are already in one's library, find new ones via DOI, etc. Some discussion here (it has advanced somewhat since then):
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/103205/is-it-possible-to-extract-references-from-article-pdfs-webpage

diegodlh · April 26, 2023

Hi, @tim820. Thanks for mentioning it! I had seen it before but haven't had the chance to try it myself yet. Based on your description of it, it looks really neat and complete!
Rest assure we will mention it in our presentation.

seredes · April 30, 2023

I have just tried the plugin at https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-reference, it's really good.