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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T12:17:44+00:00

I need a mechanism for extracting bibliographic metadata from PDF documents, to save people

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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.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    We ran a contest to solve this problem at Dev8D in London, Feb 2010 and we got a nice little GPL tool created as a result. We’ve not yet integrated it into our systems but it’s there in the world.

    https://code.google.com/p/pdfssa4met/

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