Moving collection to a Group collection and maintaining linking

rudyleon

First, thanks so much for still being such a great community, for so so long. I'm always grateful for the wisdom offered here.

That said, I just noticed that when someone exports and reimports a .RIS file, it's no longer linked to citations in existing documents. That's really problematic, since I often clean up Zotero libraries for folks using export/import. I'm really unhappy realizing the hell I have wrought in the past. I had to come up with another way to do this, but I am now hyper-cautious.

Before I start recommending my new process, I want to make sure it doesn't also break the connections.

New process: Have folks create a group library, add me to it, and then drag their collection into the group library. There's no info in the documentation of this that I could find, so hopefully someone here can verify that this will not break the connections between manuscript and citations.

Is this safe?

adamsmith

It's a better process in that you don't also have to factor in potential data loss/changes due to export import, but no, using a group won't solve your main problem: items in documents will still unlink when they are moved to the group (or to be more precise, the group library items won't be linked; the original items in their library, of course, remain linked). The other advantage with the group is that if you insert items from the group (or replace citations with ones from the group), those remain linked on returning the document to the authors because they have access to the group.

There's currently just no reasonable way to do this and there are a couple of threads by other editors facing the same problem, so you're not alone. I know Zotero is working on massively improved handling of item linkages in documents, so this will improve and I think there's a good chance that will happen soon-ish (I have seen UI screenshots), but that's not a guarantee. For now you have to muddle through, I'm afraid.