Comment by epihelix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epihelix | Hacker News Reader

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At least with Zotero Version 6, you could have just selected all your PDFs and drag-n-dropped them into the interface.

Like another poster here, trusting an LLM with my reference database -- the ultimate source of truth -- is not a step I'd be willing to take. All it takes is a single hallucinated reference, and your career would be forever tainted. It's not worth the risk.

Sadly, Zotero seems to have removed this killer import feature in later versions, which is the reason I keep using version 6. It feels like later versions have been a route to dumbing-down the interface, prioritising simplicity (and an ultra-low-contrast interface) at the expense of functionality. (If you can still drag-n-drop PDFs straight in with the new versions, someone please let me know?)

>At least with Zotero Version 6, you could have just selected all your PDFs and drag-n-dropped them into the interface.

I'm on version 9. I did the drag and drop for some of the files, but Zotero has only like 50% hit rate with finding the correct bibtex, and those are not that high quality either. People talk about hallucinations using LLMs, but I found them to be more reliable and produces richer metadata than Zotero's system. You can even use the Beaver plugin to correct the metadata, if you find them dubious or low quality.

>All it takes is a single hallucinated reference, and your career would be forever tainted.

Of any references I use, I always read the PDFs. The entire point of me using Zotero is to manage PDFs and being able to read them. If the title and author data in the item view don't match the PDFs then it's easy to notice. And even if i get the reference wrong, i'm not worried about my career, because it wouldn't matter.

I still drag and drop PDFs in Zotero 7. It's less finicky then v6, even. The trick is to drop them to root of the tree on the left. Not to the middle of the interface.

Drag-and-drop of the PDF file worked for me in Zotero 9 (latest version). I never used this feature before. This would be greatly preferred to my earlier suggestion to get a LLM to generate a list of DOIs.

I drag-drop PDFs and ePubs, read PDFs and ePubs, and sync mobile with laptop, etc.

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