Thank you. The website says, "When you add a PDF directly, Zotero will initially save it as a standalone attachment and then automatically attempt to retrieve metadata for it and create a parent item."

This is not happening, and I have tried multiple academic science articles for multiple journals. In reality, does this not work? Or, could this not be working if you are using a slower internet connection?

Note, this works really well in the downloaded app. It's how I normally use Zotero.

The documentation (and all our documentation) is about the desktop app. The explanation is the same, but you can only add files to existing bibliographic items — it's not possible to create a parent item for a standalone attachment or to move a standalone attachment into a regular item. The web library also can't yet retrieve metadata for a PDF.

Unless the requirements here are pretty basic, I'd strongly recommend teaching the actual Zotero desktop app, which just has vastly more functionality. We're always working to add more functionality to the web library, but it's primarily intended as a companion tool at this time, with any significant work being done in the desktop app.

In general, though, you also just wouldn't want to teach a workflow where you're uploading PDFs manually. Even if you do teach the web library, you'd want to teach them to use the Zotero Connector and save directly to the online library, which will save high-quality metadata and PDFs where possible.