I need to do quite a bit of updating and cleaning on the metadata for PDFs already in my Paperpile library. I can successfully export all my references to a csv file, where I would like to do the batch cleaning of my metadata (i.e. modify dates to year only format, add DOIs, fix typos and remove unnecessary urls).
Is it possible to upload/merge the work done in the csv back to Paperpile?
Unfortunately we do not allow importing of files which contain mostly the same entries so so exporting + editing + importing is unlikely to work. We support importing of CSV data. You may be able to export to RIS, trash your papers, import your modified RIS file, then restore the trashed papers, then use the duplicates filter to merge the entries, but this whole flow is prone to produce some edge cases and the merging process may not favor your edits.
It is likely easiest to add all the papers you wish to process to a folder, then select the first paper and open the edit box with Shift + E, make your edits and use the “Save and Next” button to proceed to the next paper in the folder.
You can also try selecting the papers and pressing Shift + A to auto-update their metadata. This may improve the metadata, depending on where the papers were imported from.
Thanks for the suggestions Jason. I ran a few small tests with articles from my library. It is possible to successfully edit the exported RIS and get it to reimport the citation correctly. However, upon restoring the paper from trash and merging duplicates, the updated work is overwritten. This is especially true when the modified RIS had incorrect items deleted. It appears that the merge operation is very conservative and attempts to keep as much information as possible from both entries.
For now, I will have to edit through citations individually within PaperPile.