Merge fields without merging entries

Jean.Pare

Hello everyone,

I want to know if there is a way of making the fields uniform over multiple entries (as when merging) without actually merging them. The reason for this is that merging also merges tags, but I am using tags in a folder-specific way, making merging problematic.

Any idea?

adamsmith

probably not, no. But I also don't quite understand, could you perhaps provide an example of what you're trying to achieve?

Jean.Pare

Say I have two entries of the same book, one in folder A, one in folder B. However, some fields of each entry are slightly different. Normally I would merge them, and make the fields uniform. However, the one in folder A has tag "1" and the one in folder B has tag "2", and if I merge them, they'll each end up with both the tag "1" and the tag "2", whereas I want both entries to keep only the tag they have already. So I'm trying to find a way of quickly making the different entries have the same fields without merging the tags.

I could do it manually, but considering I have over 190 duplicates, growing daily, it would be a bit too time consuming.

adamsmith

sorry, no way to do that. We'll get batch editing at some point, but not super soon.

But stepping back, obviously you know best how to organize your library, but you're setting yourself up for lots of potential problems down the road, so let me at least flag this and you can decide whether it's relevant.
Most importantly, when you're e.g. going to cite these items in a Word document, you're very easily going to end up citing both of them, so you'll have the same work appearing in the bibliography twice and will then have to wade through the Word document getting rid of one of them, which is tedious. It'd seem like it would be better to switch your usage of tags and collections, but obviously YMMV.

Jean.Pare

The tags are used to indicate a certain type of usage of the source within a section of the larger group project. That is why tags are used on a subcollection basis. Since every person works within their own subcollection, there should be no issue of double-citing. At least none have been noticed so far, with over a dozen documents produced by half as many individuals.

If you have any suggestions as to how to better manage the sources, suggest away. We are talking a project of over 5 years, at least 30-40 contributors, and at least 20'000 separate bibliographic entries, many of which will be duplicates. However, we also need to be able to track down notes and tags down to the subcollection level. It's on a single topics, and the the only major distinction between sources is the item type, so classical usage of tags is not necessary, hence why we are currently using them as importance indicator.