cannot create reference links from PDFs

pcushman · February 21, 2023

With the new PDF features I am finding both on my Mac and my PC that when I have a document that links to a PDF, Zotero will not create a reference. It just comes out in citations and bibliographies as the name of the document and nothing more. Do I need to start manually inputting these documents?

dstillman · February 21, 2023

It's not totally clear what you mean — I don't know what "a document that links to a PDF" means — but I think there's some confusion here. Zotero 6 added a PDF reader, but nothing at all changed about how you cite items in Zotero. You've always needed regular items with metadata, not just attachment items.

Read through this section, in particular the "Standalone Attachments and Parent Items" part.

pcushman · February 21, 2023

When I find a document online that I want to turn into a reference the Zotero Icon from my extension in both MS and Mac systems says "save as PDF." When I do that Zotero does indeed save that document as a PDF but it does not create an actual reference; i.e. it does not extract author or journal info or date. It's just collecting the PDFs but I cannot utilize the core function of Zotero, which is to reference that document as a citation or bibliography. For example, I want to add this to my library, https://www.healthquality.va.gov/guidelines/MH/sud/VADoDSUDCPG.pdf but when I do it just adds "VA_DoD_Clinical_Practice_Guideline_for_the_Management_of_Substance_Use_Disorders" as the citation, which is not helpful at all. Thank you!

dstillman · February 21, 2023

Yes, so see the section I linked to. There's nothing new here at all.

And from Retrieve PDF Metadata, linked from that section:

Zotero should retrieve high-quality metadata for most academic PDFs. While it can sometimes extract basic information (title, author) from other documents, you shouldn't expect that — anything can be distributed as a PDF, but that doesn’t mean there’s any standard metadata available for it.