Extracting information from PDFs of research papers
I need a mechanism for extracting bibliographic metadata from PDF documents, to save people entering it by hand or cut-and-pasting it.
At the very least, the title and abstract. The list of authors and their affiliations would be good. Extracting out the references would be amazing.
Ideally this would be an open source solution.
The problem is that not all PDF's encode the text, and many which do fail to preserve the logical order of the text, so just doing pdf2text gives you line 1 of column 1, line 1 of column 2, line 2 of column 1 etc.
I know there's a lot of libraries. It's identifying the abstract, title authors etc. on the document that I need to solve. This is never going to be possible every time, but 80% would save a lot of human effort.
Answer
I'm only allowed one link per posting so this is it: pdfinfo Linux manual page
This might get the title and authors. Look at the bottom of the manual page, and there's a link to www.foolabs.com/xpdf where the open source for the program can be found, as well as binaries for various platforms.
To pull out bibliographic references, look at cb2bib:
cb2Bib is a free, open source, and multiplatform application for rapidly extracting unformatted, or unstandardized bibliographic references from email alerts, journal Web pages, and PDF files.
You might also want to check the discussion forums at www.zotero.org where this topic has been discussed.