Retrieving
PDF Metadata
Users new to
Zotero may find the prospect of importing all their data somewhat daunting.
Many researchers already have a large collection of PDFs that they've
previously organized manually or using another program. Zotero makes it easy to
import these PDFs and retrieve full bibliographic metadata (for searching,
citing, indexing, and organizing), taking much of the pain out of switching.
Follow these
steps to use the Retrieve Metadata for PDFs function:
1.
Drag your existing PDFs into your Zotero library or use the
“Store Copy of File” or “Link to File” options from the add new item menu
(green plus sign).
2.
By default, Zotero will automatically
retrieve metadata for PDFs and rename
the associated files. If you prefer, you can disable these automatic functions
in the General pane of Zotero preferences.
If you have
disabled automatic metadata retrieval or have other PDF files already in your
library, you can also retrieve metadata manually:
1.
In the middle pane, select the PDFs you want to retrieve
metadata for.
2.
Right-click on the PDFs and select “Retrieve Metadata for
PDFs”.
3.
If Zotero can find a match for the item, it will create a full
Zotero item with the available data and attach the PDF.
4.
If Zotero can't find metadata for an item, you can right-click
on it and choose “Create Parent Item” to manually enter the item metadata.
With this
feature, there should be no major hurdles to switching to Zotero and taking
full advantage of all its powerful search, indexing, organizing, and citation
features.
The Retrieve
Metadata feature uses a Zotero web service to find item metadata. The Zotero
client sends the first few pages of a PDF to the web service, which uses a
variety of extraction algorithms and known metadata from Crossref, paired with
DOI and ISBN lookups, to build a parent item for the PDF. The Zotero lookup
service doesn’t require a Zotero account and doesn’t log any data about the
content or results of searches.
Note: While this feature can greatly facilitate importing large
existing libraries of PDFs, it is not the best way to add items to your
library in general. Items can be imported faster by using the Zotero Connector
plugin in your browser from publisher websites or most scholarly databases.
This saves several steps versus downloading the PDF manually and adding it to
Zotero. The item metadata will also often be of higher quality. See Adding
Items to Zotero for more info. Adapted from https://www.zotero.org/support/.