Creating citations from local PDFs

MichaelBishop
Over the years I've collected hundreds of pdfs. I wish I could designate the folder they reside in and have Zotero enter them into its database.
  • adamsmith
    I think you're a bit optimistic about the magic Zotero can work.
    What you can do is to drag the pdfs into Zotero - I'd recommend batches of about 25 - and then use the retrieve metadata function, available on right-clicking. Once again, batches of 20 or so are recommended. This might not work for all of them - you'll have to enter data for the rest of them by hand.
    Also, before requesting features, do search around a little on the forum - if it's something that sounds like many people would like it, it has almost certainly been discussed in the past.
  • npj
    edited January 20, 2010
    I'd also suggest to Michael to not despair at the task of entering some of the pdfs by hand. Often, it's pretty easy to find the corresponding paper through a search engine, and then use Zoteros facilities for grabbing it to the database. Then you can attach the pdfs to the entry. It's really very rare that I've had to enter authors, titles etc. manually.

    Also, Zotero can full-text-search the pdfs even if they don't have a full entry. You can find them when searching and add metadata as necessary, in many cases you might find that they're not relevant anymore anyway. I have a folder called "unsorted" where I keep these.

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