In Duplicate Items, only items of same type should be auto-selected

pgdr

When two "duplicate" items but with differing types (say a conference paper and a journal paper) appear in the Duplicate Items and I click one, the other one is selected.

This means that I manually have to deselect all items of one type to be able to merge.

In processRows in duplicates.js [1], I would strongly prefer that "if a.itemType != b.itemType" then return 0 (i.e., do not automatically select items of different types).

Is there a reason why it selects items of different type, only to prevent us from merging these because of differing types?

Should I submit a pull request?


[1] https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/master/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/duplicates.js#L332

bwiernik

In most cases in my experience, duplicate items of different types are erroneously of different types and one needs to be fixed

pgdr

That is probably highly dependent on the research area, then, because in my field it's not uncommon to have three publications with the same authors, title, and within three years, (a) arXiv, (b) conference proceedings, (c) journal version.

The thing is, when the journal version comes out, I no longer need the arXiv version, so I'm happy merging those; they also happen to have the same type.