Import a large quantity of books by their ISBN number

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#1

Hello,
I recently discovered Jabref and I would like to import a large quantity of books by their ISBN number because I saw that by just entering this number the software was able to retrieve the book info.
I have found how to enter the books one by one but it is getting tedious to enter a large quantity.

Note: To enter the ISBN number I use a barcode scanner to scan it directly on the book which works when I scan a book in “add by ID”.

Is there a way to do this?

Thank you in advance for your answer and your help!

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#2

Hi,

In JabRef it’s not directly possible to do this for many entries, but you could use https://www.ottobib.com/ and then paste the bibtex code on the table (JabRef then automatically adds entries)

#3

Thank you for your reply!
I have tested the solution you suggested. However, it doesn’t work for me:
Firstly my scanner enters a line break and opens the downloads page after scanning the code. The site wants a comma after each entry.
Then, once the line breaks are removed and the comma inserted I can validate but I am obliged to copy each bibtex code one by one which is longer than the solution I can have on jabref: reopen the window to insert a new ID,
Finally I noticed that the information given by the site is less provided than that given by jabref,

Looking for the perfect solution!
Thanks again for your answer!

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#4

I like the idea of simply allowing to add multiple identifiers (ISBNs, dois, etc) in jabref - and then being guided through the entries somehow entry by entry.
Though any such solution would probably not be able to accommodate arbitrary input formats.

I used the proposed solution at Import a large quantity of books by their ISBN number - #2 by Siedlerchr and my scanner’s output also did not work. So I simply postprocessed my scanner’s output to fit the ottobib requirements.

#5

Thanks for your answer !
I supposed in this part you used the software of your scanner (or an other way ?),
However how did you do for the copy/past of each document ? by hand ?

#6

as a scanner I use a smartphone with a isbn scanner app, and that gets me a list of isbns. the list’s format is not entirely useable, so I copied it into a spreadsheet (libreoffice) and removed some lines, and then was able to precisely select, copy and paste into ottobib as needed.

#7

A bulk import would indeed be very useful. I tried with OttoBib as suggested here but it is cumbersome for long lists of ISBNs and the result doesn’t show the numbers that failed so that I have to check manually which ones didn’t return a result. I tried the skipped numbers again directly in JabRef and there I could often get a result.