PDF added, but pane won't show "Info" for metadata edits

sefer.tapuach · July 25, 2023

I'm experimenting with adding my PDFs to Zotero. But I ran into a problem. With about half my files, things on normal. On the right side, there's some metadata, and I can change it. However, with the other half, all I have is a title identical to the filename, and the right side doesn't let me change the metadata—instead, it's some other kind of pane for note-taking. See here:

https://pasteboard.co/sOsUlDS2nY8t.png

I can't figure out how to switch back to the normal pane where it says INFO NOTES TAGS RELATED PREVIEW

dstillman · July 25, 2023

See this section, including "Standalone Attachments and Parent Items":

https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero#adding_pdfs_and_other_files

sefer.tapuach · July 25, 2023

Thank you for the (immediate!) response, this fixes my roadblock.

One more problem. I should have added this:

All my PDFs follow a convention, LastName_Year_Title. I don't understand why I can't at least have each standalone attachments generate parent items with these tags. This would save a lot of labor since I'll have thousands of pdfs in this situation.

dstillman · July 25, 2023

I don't understand why I can't at least have each standalone attachments generate parent items with these tags.

I mean, you can write a script (or have someone write a script) that does whatever you want, but that's not something Zotero would support out of the box — the whole point of Zotero is that it saves high-quality metadata, and that metadata comes from reliable web-based sources, including official metadata repositories. Filenames aren't reliable sources of metadata, and they're not remotely close to complete.

As explained in the documentation, when you drag PDFs to Zotero, it will attempt to recognize the file and retrieve high-quality metadata. If that doesn't work, you'd generally enter an identifier or save from a canonical web source. Anything beyond that would be fairly pointless, since you can already search for files based on just the filename. But if getting just those three (partial, possibly truncated) fields into Zotero in lieu of all of Zotero's other processes for retrieving metadata is important to you, you'd have to script that yourself.