(I don't think it would work with papers too old to have DOIs but haven't checked lately.)
The metadata retrieval process is a very handy feature, especially paired with Zotero's web browser plugin.
Zotero also keeps a repository of all the citation styles, which are curated and administered by the Zotero team and stored in a Github repo [2].
It automatically added 90-95% of PDFs I imported, most directly from Sci-Hub with no editing from me.
What is the proper way to store PDFs that I annotate (say, using Okular in Linux) on Zotero with the ability to send them to other researchers and then update them?
I don't mind paying money for cloud storage, but I gotta be able to work with the pdfs.
Then you can annotate the file and save it. If Zotero creates a copy of the file when you save your annotations, you might need to use Show file by right clicking the article in Zotero and make changes to the file in Zotero's storage. In Linux, that'll be in ~/Zotero.
[1] https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1977/changing-the-defau...
When I say a bit of a pain, I mean it - I switched to Mendeley with great sadness because its mobile application means I can read and annotate papers on my tablet and have it synchronised perfectly with my desktop.
On a semi-related note: the Mendeley mobile application makes selecting text a joy on a touchscreen with a kind of magnifying glass. I really wish it was built into Android system wide.
What kind of annotations are that? I think GP refers to document annotations, which are stored in the PDF file itself.
If they are stored in the file itself, that's news to me. Last time I used it, Okular didn't modify the actual PDF and considered that a feature.
Thanks!
It does that, and it can actually look up metadata from pdfs. But: It can NOT update already existing entries from such a lookup. You have to delete the pdf and re-import. Why? No reason.
It's this sort of really bad usability decision that makes Zotero just not very good imo.
Disclosure: Zotero developer
If not, with Zotero you have a chance of getting a missing feature added. Not so with the closed-source Mendeley. Especially now they have started doing user-hostile lock-in stuff like gratuitously encrypting users' data, making it no longer accessible to the user (see downthread).
With Zotero, in principle you could hack together something using `bash` and `sqlite3` that batch-updated documents; you may not even need to look at the source code to the official app. It's ad-hoc munging like that that Mendeley has recently gone out of its way to prevent, stopping people from working effectively with their own data.
Zotero can not update metadata for a PDF you already have in your library
Hence, adding an existing library means you have to do it manually for each pdf This is bad design, because the functionality exists, but it's implemented in a way that makes everything complicated for no reason at all.
Why disable the "lookup metadata" button for a pdf which is already in a library? WHYYYYY
So far, Zotero's metadata lookup seems about the same quality.
I mean it is nice that Zotero has an import browser plugin (which, btw, Mendeley does as well), but once you have a substantial library of pdfs, it is just too time consuming to re-import it all again, type in names, years, journals etc. ugh..
Also, Mendeley can open pdfs within the app and has great features for mark-up and comments. Reviewing a paper is really nice this way. In fact, Mendeley is the program with the best mark-up features on all of Linux, in my opinon. And all this is synced across devices.
I'd love to use Zotero but tbh Mendeley is just better.