Create duplicate entry including attachments

darkdragon84 · 2023-01-17T11:02:44+00:00

Hi! We have a shared group library to stay up to date in our field. I also have my private collection, which is much larger. I also heavily annotate my pdfs and sync the annotated pdfs as attachments with zotero. Now the whole group is of course not interested in seeing my annotations. Is there an easy way to copy an entry over from the group library to my own library, s.t. attachments are also duplicated? If I just drag and drop into my library, then my annotations are synced. If I duplicate the entry, the attachments are not duplicated. How can I duplicate an entry including attachments? Cheers

dstillman · 2023-01-17T23:30:43+00:00

I'm not sure I understand. If you duplicated the attachment, it would have annotations, no? (I'm interpreting this as your creating annotations using an external PDF reader, not Zotero's built-in PDF reader.) Or are you saying you would duplicate the file before you made annotations?

It's not possible to duplicate a PDF within Zotero itself, since there's not really any workflow we recommend that involves that, but you can always right-click → Show File and drag the PDF back into Zotero on another item. But, again, if you're using an external PDF reader, the annotations would just be in that copy too.

The cleanest way to do this is to use Zotero's built-in PDF reader and deselect "Annotations" for copying between libraries in the Groups section of the Zotero preferences. (An upcoming version will make it easier to change these settings when dragging.)

darkdragon84 · 2023-01-18T14:19:25+00:00

The work flow we envision is that we have a clean group library (no annotations) and ppl can copy over papers they need into their private libraries where they can add annotations. What we don't want is that annotations ppl make in their private libraries show up in the group library. I tried it yesterday though and it seems that drag & drop from the group into the private libraray does duplicate the attachments too, so it does exactly what we want. Somehow I thought this was not the case (as drag & drop between collections in the same library just adds references and doesn't duplicate the item). I read about the show file -> drag back onto different item workaround, which works too :-) Thanks for your help!