Papers import ala Mendeley

bwiernik
I have a bunch of colleagues who currently use Papers or ReadCube and are interested in moving to Zotero with the new PDF reader and iOS app. Unfortunately, the available export options in Papers make it hard to preserve collection organization and PDF annotations.

I’m wondering whether an import tool for Papers ala the Mendeley import might be considered?
  • ethanwillis
    Taking a look at the online Papers/Readcube app it looks like it's definitely possible to build a scraper that can preserve all the organization. I'll have to dig deeper to see what it's like to preserve the PDF annotations, but I think that should also be possible.

    I might be able to make an import tool similar to the Mendeley one, just need to find the time to do so!
  • Garrath
    I'd like to add my enthusiasm for this.
    I've reached the end of the line with Papers3, and now Zotero includes a pdf reader, I'm all in with it.
    (Thanks for the great work on this - it's been a painful lesson, not to become dependent on proprietary software...)
  • tblock
    I was wondering if there is any update about how to import all of one's papers from Papers (confusing) and the organization into Zotero? If there is any more advice that would be great! I am excited to leave Papers behind and join the Zotero world.
  • nathancashion
    Has anyone found a good solution to preserve PDF annotations?

    I've moved from Papers 3 using this Papers3-to-Zotero script: https://github.com/anjiro/Papers3-to-Zotero
    But this doesn't maintain existing annotations.

    I have also imported my Papers 3 library to the new ReadCube Papers (which was actually a huge PITA, but support finally resolved my issues after about 3 months), which DOES maintain annotations.

    I'm wondering if there's a ReadCube Papers to Zotero process that will maintain annotations, or if there's a better way to get annotated PDFs from Papers 3.

    The big challenge is that I can't find a way to isolate/filter just the references in Papers 3 with PDFs that have annotations. If I could, I would just export those and manually import to Zotero and resolve duplicates. (I have ~3800 references, but probably a couple hundred at most with annotations.)
    I've considered just exporting all PDFs and importing those to Zotero. Unfortunately, I haven't had good success with Zotero correctly finding the metadata for PDFs.
  • carlosbarbudo
    @nathancashion have you found any solution?
  • bwiernik
    Does Papers provide a way to embed annotations in the PDF files on export (the way Zotero does)? Zotero can import PDF-standard annotations
  • wssgoh
    Any update on the query for readcube to zotero migration of pdfs with annotations?
  • bwiernik
    Same as above—use readcube’s functions to embed the annotations into the PDF files, then import those files into Zotero with your library
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