Entering details from an online PDF

pwotg
Here's how it works.
I search for something and find that there is a pdf of the journal article I want. In Mozilla I can open it directly and read it.
It's valuable so I want to enter it into Zotero.
I can drag the icon from the left of the address bar onto Zotero and it's saved, but in the righthand pane there is just the filename and the 'view snapshot' and 'show files' buttons, under which appears a URL, filename accessed etc.
I can, at this stage, try to retrieve the metadata from the pdf (which will then populate the citation fields) but if there is no metadata (about 20% of pdfs in my exp) then I can't add the author, title date etc manually...or CAN I?
What am I doing wrong?
  • asplundj
    edited May 14, 2010
    Just add a new item manually http://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-basics-manually-adding-items-and-files/

    and then drag the pdf to the new entry
  • pwotg
    Yes, that's pretty much what I do. But that's assuming you know a priori that there is no metadata to make the process quicker. In which case you would create the item first and then drag the PDF onto it.

    My usual form is to say 'yup, I like that' and add it to the library and see if Zotero will pick up the information needed from the 'Retrieve metadata from PDF' menu item.

    If it turns out there isn't any, then I have to create a NEW item, find* the PDF and drag it onto the new item.

    *this can be tricky in a big collection where the name of the file might be grud7883jhnd.pdf and you can't quite remember...
  • ajlyon
    If it turns out there isn't any, then I have to create a NEW item, find* the PDF and drag it onto the new item.
    There's a plan to have the Retrieve Metadata function automatically attach the PDF to a blank Zotero item when the metadata retrieval fails. That would make things a little more smooth for you.
  • pwotg
    That would be perfect. :-D
  • asplundj
    Yes that sounds useful in the meantime you can sort your library by date added then you will have the pdf on top
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