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Participant
June 4, 2018
Question

How to attach metadata (reference/biblio) info to a quote from a pdf

  • June 4, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 331 views

Hi all, new here, apologies, already searched the forum for a previous such question,

in reading a pdf book or research paper that I have legally downloaded as a uni student (for a standard lit. review, paper/article, whatever, that I am writing), I would like to be able to highlight (or otherwise select and copy) a piece of text from the pdf file and subsequently copy it to a word processor application, but - here's the thing, -- I need to have certain metadata attached to the actual quote that I've just taken, so that I can subsequently easily identify this quote in the "bibliography" or "references" section of my paper.

ideally, this is done by an app, though so far, I haven't been able to find one, none of the pdf readers/markup software seems to go this far,

can anyone tell me whether, when a section of text is lifted from a pdf file, whether there is any metadata that is, or could be, assigned/attached to this piece of text (now on a clipboard), so that it is carried, more-or-less for ever, with the quote taken?

this metadata would include the usual biblio/reference stuff, such as Author, Article/Book Title, Date of Pub., Publisher, etc.

note that I am aware that an entire pdf file has/can have metadata attached to it, but I am needing to have such info attached to a piece of text that I copy from it, not just the entire file itself . . .

thanks!

Peter B

Maple Ridge, BC

Canada

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1 reply

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 5, 2018

Try Zotero. It has quite an advanced reference mechanism, although I can't say for sure if it does exactly what you've described. I know it's quite populate with academics, though.