Finding duplicates within collection
Hi!
I'm doing a systematic lit review and have pulled out the articles I want to screen from 8 relevant databases. I would now like to find duplicates between my 8 subcollections, put I can only find an option to flag the duplicates within my whole library.
Is there a way to specify that you only want a specific collection to be scan for duplicates? If not, is there a way that I can open a new library (and so not get those articles mixed up with my other "personal" library)?
Thks for your help!
I'm doing a systematic lit review and have pulled out the articles I want to screen from 8 relevant databases. I would now like to find duplicates between my 8 subcollections, put I can only find an option to flag the duplicates within my whole library.
Is there a way to specify that you only want a specific collection to be scan for duplicates? If not, is there a way that I can open a new library (and so not get those articles mixed up with my other "personal" library)?
Thks for your help!
For the second question, yes. Make a new private Group (on Zotero.org if you don't see Group Libraries in your Zotero client). The group will have its own library that is completely separate from your personal library. You don't have to invite anyone else to share the library with you. This is the practice I always recommend for doing systematic reviews because it also lets you have a different set of tags from your personal library that you can use to organize the review and track the status of different articles.
That was helpful!
It might be better to fudge the terminology a bit and put everything under the "Collection" condition, including saved searches, since people probably think of these things all together, since they're together in the left pane.
Rather than adding Duplicate Items as an option in advanced search, making the Duplicate Items collection itself configurable seems like the better approach to me. You could then right-click Duplicate Items and add a condition to check for duplicates in a given collection. See also this discussion.
I hope the developer will take a look and implement this feature on the nearest update.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Best regards!
It seems that you can merge two collections in a scratch group probably and then remove one collection. When you merge in the duplicate view you get a referenced copy in both source collections. I'm not sure if collections from other groups will interfere.
Some ability to view what collection dupes are in, and maybe in column view what items in a collection are dupes (or, separately, multiply referenced), would be very helpful.
Also, though, just to be clear, when you merge items, the merged item is kept in all collections that any of the duplicate items existed in. So in most situations, this isn't something you need to worry about.