Cleaning up Zotero Database: where to start?

TomVre
Over 10 years ago, at the start of my academic career I started using Zotero, not setting up Zotero correctly and moving back and forth between Mendeley and EndNote did not provide a well established database. The integrity of the database is fine, however, the search option is terribly slow with over 12k items, of which a large quantity (9k) is double (triple, quadruple) saved in the database (but not in certain collections).

Therefore, I would like to restart. However, some (sub)collections (50 folders with about 10-30 items each) are organised as I settled with Zotero a couple months ago.

Do you have any advice on how to start cleaning up my dataset and 'start fresh' with only keeping the collections mentioned?

Deleting it all and re-adding seems a bit overkill... Any other options?

  • adamsmith
    If I understand you correctly, you only want to keep the 50 collections that are organized, getting rid of everything else? If so, you could use a colored tag to keep tag all "organized" items with "a keep" tag, then do an advanced search for Top level items with "Tag -- is not -- keep" create a saved search and delete all items in there
  • arggem
    @adamsmith: Could you also select "Unfiled Items" then select all and delete?
  • adamsmith
    right -- you could delete all collections you don't want to keep (making sure to just delete the collections, not the items in them at that point) and then delete everything in "Unfiled."

    That might work even better because you'll have the collection structure cleaned up too as a result.
  • TomVre
    Thanks @adamsmith and @arggem for the advice. It seems that I can not add a tag to a collection but only the items in it? In that case I should add some info: the collections all have sub collections, so that would involve some clicking. Could do that, but is there a more convenient way to tag all items “to keep”?
  • dstillman
    View → Show Folders from Subcollections.
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