library populated by entries not made by me

cjkudlick

I tried Zotero for awhile about three months ago, then uninstalled it from Firefox, then recently I reinstalled it. When I logged on, my library was full of items I didn't put there. They *are* related to my research, but I'm certain I didn't enter them, either three months ago or now. (The creation dates are all the day I re-installed Zotero.) In some cases there are multiple copies. Looking at the items, none of the info on the right hand panel gives me any clues. It appears I've set some automatic feature to hunt for books, but if that's the case, I didn't do a great job because most of them are only tangentially related to what I want. Could anyone help me solve this mystery?

Also, a little question: what does the column with 1's and 2's on the left-hand panel refer to, and why do some entries have no numbers at all? (No label comes up when I hover the cursor over it, but I can expand the view a bit so that there's a + and a triangle pointing downward that reverses the order

Thank you.

ajlyon

There is no feature to automatically save items. It is possible that a site translator is acting up, and you are getting extra items from search results when you save, but I've never heard of that happening. Do any of the items have useful data in the Library Catalog field?

The + column is the number of attachments. I don't think it's very useful-- you can hide it by customizing the columns using the button at the top-right of that list.

cjkudlick

Thanks! Upon closer inspection, it looks like all the items in question are from j-stor, and that the duplicates arrived two and three minutes later. I don't recall doing a search in j-stor though, and if I had, I wouldn't have chosen the items that showed up.

As for the 1s and 2s, I'm surprised because I don't see any attachments. Where do I look for the actual attachments? Does Zotero create them when I grab a reference from amazon? That would explain a couple of the 1s. But the 2s from j-stor?

adamsmith

for JSTOR, Zotero by default creates a snapshot of the page and attaches the pdf of the article.
for amazon it just attaches the snapshot of the page.
You can see the attachments by clicking on the plus to the left of the item.

did you join a group at any time? Are you using the sync feature of Zotero?

cjkudlick

I'm pretty sure I didn't join a group because I'm not sure what that means. I am using the sync feature, assuming that it's a way of backing up my library. Are you thinking my library is public and that these items could have been added by someone else? I'd like to share with one or two others, but not the world at this point.

adamsmith

I'm thinking you might have left your account accessible to someone else, who then added items. It's the only way I could think of that items would appear in your library that you're sure you didn't add yourself.
Could have been that you used a common computer and left your sync information in there and someone else kept using Zotero.
Even if your library were public (and it's not), people couldn't add items to it.

cjkudlick

I don't think I left my account accessible to someone else - at least not on purpose. I know for a fact that I've only accessed Zotero from my laptop because I never use other computers. Based on our conversation, I think it's more likely that I initiated a search from within Zotero without fully realizing how it worked, and that maybe I repeated this a couple of times, which would explain the multiple entries. Either that or I have elves, and I will hire them out. Thanks for your help. The program is clearly a lot smarter than I am as its user!