Answered By: Keely Wilczek
Last Updated: Aug 13, 2020     Views: 56

This can happen for a few different reasons:

  1. Check the General settings under Preferences to make sure the box next to Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items is checked.
  2. Look to see if you are using an article citation aggregator as opposed to a database that actually contains the full text for articles. Google Scholar and HOLLIS are examples of aggregators. When using an aggregator, PDFs do not always get automatically attached.
  3. Does the database you are using require an extra step to get to the PDF? An example is the Taylor & Francis platform which requires users to choose between a regular PDF and an interactive PDF.

If Zotero is not able to grab a pdf, you can always download the pdf yourself and drag and drop it on the item's information within Zotero.
https://asklib.hks.harvard.edu/faq/159402
asklib.hks.harvard.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-40
23450
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VRSHQ55WEOXZ6W3M4TVRZT5ZFAO3XVQD
<urn:uuid:ba57cbd6-7c64-4ff2-bf69-610d169f8dbd>
2020-09-20T17:28:40Z
52.5.154.105
text/html
sha1:BGIOGKP6A6M5KGXRJZTNDOJCTFMRSFWQ
<urn:uuid:9ea62c0b-a283-4b7c-a158-32b50c8ba75e>
https://asklib.hks.harvard.edu/faq/159402
response
<urn:uuid:138a4de5-79dc-4fb5-be74-aca75c189ab8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-123.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/