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#183 monitor PDF folder
One really great feature would be to be able to monitor
the pdf folder so that files that are added can be
quickly fetched ( via PubMed or so ). This would be
useful since I actually first download the pdf files
and then have to fetch its reference. One great way to
do this would be for the program to recognize some
unique reference in the filename ( e.g.
journal+vol+page ) and fetch it.
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I have a something like this working already, I store my
pdfs in the following format: "PMID_(PMID number).pdf"
(ignore quotes), eg PMID_178838.pdf
As the PMID is unique for each reference/pdf, I have a
script that compiles a list of PMIDs from PDF's based on
searching a selected local folder for the file pattern
"PMID_*.pdf" . The script then queries Pubmed with the list
of PMIDs and downloads the corresponding references as an
XML file. I then import this into Jabref.
I have set up the Jabref bibtex key to be "PMID_{PMID}", and
have defined the pdf folder, Jabref then automatically links
the reference to my PDF files (with a couple of exceptions,
for which i have posted a bug report).
Sadly my script is written using winbatch, but i suspect it
probably wouldn't take too much modification to Jabref to
incorporate the above idea into the program. From a point of
priniciple this does seem to work (although perhaps only for
pubmed references). From my inital look at Jabref it
possesses most of that functionality already, but it may
just needs a couple more tweaks to link the folder scan, and
reference retrieval together. Unfortunately I'm not
proficient in java, so will not be able to do it myself (yet).
Regards
DanB
As a simple precursor to this request, it would be nice if there were a tool in JabRef which listed any files in the directory which are not currently associated with a reference. This would help the user locate papers which have been saved but he/she has forgotten to add a JabRef reference.
Then, the add-on feature could be to either attempt to fetch the bibtex information from a combination of any of: (1) the user, (2) pdf metadata, (3) the internet. But the tool above would probably be much easier to implement than this latter part.
JabRef 2.9 supports "Find unlinked files...". However, continuous monitoring is not implemented.