Keywords are not automatically extracted as tags from imported PDFs

dioan
Hi everyone,

When I add an item to my collection by importing a PDF ("Link to file..." or "Store copy of file...") Zotero is not automatically extracting the keywords as tags.
I have the "Miscellaneous" option "Automatically tag items with keywords and subject headings" enabled.

Is this feature not functioning for references imported from PDFs?

Thanks.
  • dstillman
    What keywords are you referring to?

    That setting is about saving from the web. Nothing to do with locally attached files.
  • dioan
    I am referring to an article's keywords, typically found underneath the abstract.

    I tried importing an article with keywords using different methods (importing the PDF, adding by identifier, importing the .ris file) and none generate automatic tags based on the keywords.

    Am I misunderstanding the function?

    I am on Zotero 6.0.35, by the way.
  • dstillman
    What you see in the PDF isn't relevant. Keywords aren't some intrinsic property of academic articles — they're just metadata provided in some contexts by certain publishers. This depends entirely on where you're importing from.

    You'll get tags most frequently when importing from article pages on the web — the standard way of saving things to Zotero. You might get them for certain identifiers — which includes PDF metadata retrieval — but it's not as common. (I'm not sure they're ever available for DOI-based imports.) A RIS import would never give you automatic tags (since there's no such distinction in the RIS format), though it might include manual tags in some cases.

    We'd need specific examples to say more.
  • dioan
    Thank you for the thorough reply, I understand the matter now.

    I should have been using Zotero Connector from the start, as the documentation suggests. Once I tried that with the same articles, I immediately got the automatic tags.

    My apologies for not reading the documentation; bad habits die hard.

    It would still be nice to have the keywords automatically retrieved regardless of import option chosen, but that's a minor point now.

    Thanks for the help!
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