<p>Assuming all these papers are from arXiv, you could instead extract the arXiv id (I'd guess that searching for "arXiv:" in the PDF's text would consistently reveal the id as the first hit). </p>

<p>Once you have the arXiv reference number (and have done a <code>pip install arxiv</code>), you can get the title using</p>

<pre><code>paper_ref = '1501.00730'
arxiv.query(id_list=[paper_ref])[0].title
</code></pre>
Extracting titles from PDF files?
<p>I want to write a script to rename downloaded papers with their titles automatically, I'm wondering if there is any library or tricks i can make use of? The PDFs are all generated by TeX and should have some 'formal' structures.</p>