Thanks! Do you know if you have pdftotext working on your machine? The pdf drag-n-drop works by converting the pdf to text, and than matching a pattern to find a doi. If none is found, you get the message you noted. The url dnd works similarly, but there are a bunch of recipes for what to match depending on the base of the url. I did that on a Mac, and I haven't tested it on a windows or Linux machine. John ----------------------------------- Professor John Kitchin Doherty Hall A207F Department of Chemical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 412-268-7803 @johnkitchin http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 4:22 PM, marvin doyley wrote: > Hi John, > > I am playing with org-ref, the melpa version. > > Everything works fine except, one thing. When I drag a pdf to an empty > bibtex file it doesn’t extract the doi ( no doi found in the file:///). I > tried it pdf you used in your video (Examples of Effective Data Sharing in > Scientific Publishing), but I got the same error. Dragging the url to the > bibtex file also doesn’t works for me. > > cheers, > M > > PS by the way, your video was excellent :) >