Advice to index my papers (bunch of pdfs in hard disk) in zotero,

sdvillal · April 2, 2010

Hi all,

I have been playing with zotero and got sold by its charm. Now I would like to use it to index my papers files. I have each one in a directory named after its title that in turns contains the pdf file.

Is there a way to instruct zotero to automatically index these files by entering them into a new collection where the title is the only information known? Could then I match the titles in such collection with those in others so that I get my pdfs assigned with the actual bib entries already in zotero?

Thanks

migugg · April 2, 2010

its not clear what you attempt to do. you can use right-click, then "retrieve metadata" to add metadata to pdf files that you drag into zotero. if your pdfs are OCRed, then zotero will index them. if you already have entries in zotero, you need to drag the pdfs to these entries.
I do not understand what you want to do with collections.

emorales · April 2, 2010

sdvillal. Is not clear what you want to do. But let me just say a few things it might help. In zotero you do not have control on where the files are stored, Zotero creates its own storage folder in your computer. Every pdf you drag into the drop box in zotero will be saved into this storage folder. I repeat, you do not control this storage folder. You dont have control of the name of the folder for every pdf you drag neither. That's one piece of info you need to know. The second. After you drag a pdf file into the drop box in Zotero, you right click on it and choose "retrieve metadata" like the user migugg said above. Doing this metadata will create a zotero bibliographic information page to which your pdf will be part of. Third. Occasionally "metadata" does not work and it is advisable you look for your paper in a database, of your choice, online. After you find it, zotero lets you import this info automatically by clicking on the previous to last icon in the web address box of your browser (the last icon is usually a star, and the previous to last looks like a page with horizontal lines). Zotero also might save automatically the pdf again for you from the database you connected to. In this case you can just delete your previous pdf. Fourth and last. Since Zotero stores pdf and bibliographic info into a storage folder you don't have to keep your pdfs in the folder you previously have created. You have to let go of your way of organizing things, Zotero is doing it for you. Fifth, and real last. Once you have your items sorted out in Zotero, then you can set up collections and subcollections and whatever you can think of. Hope this helps you.