Identifying duplicates post-merge

rsinger23

Hi -- I foolishly merged duplicates in my library before counting them. I need the number of duplicates to report in a systematic review. Is there an easy way to detect which have been merged/how many duplicates there were pre-merge? Thank you!

adamsmith

Did you save searches into different collections? I don't think it'd be super hard to figure out how many items are in multiple collections. Figuring out which ones are merged duplicates is messy at best (it requires making non-standard queries directly to the database, I believe)

rsinger23

Yes, items are saved into 4 different collections. I don't understand what you said.

adamsmith

Would you have duplicate items within the same collection? If so, this won't work, but if you wouldn't have, you can add up the item counts of all four collections, which would be the total item count pre-deduping and subtract the actual total item count from the library to get the number of duplicates removed.

rsinger23

Ah, that makes sense and works because there weren't dups within same collection. Thank you! So, this implies that merging is reflected in the library but the collection count should stay constant pre and post-merge, right? Since no items are actually deleted from collections.

adamsmith

Correct, when you merge duplicate items from two different collections, the merged item is in both collections.

rsinger23

Thanks so much. And need to account for items remaining in duplicates that weren't able to merge due to different item types. (Stating this for the benefit of anyone who may in a similar situation). Thanks again.