Finding duplicates within collection

EnyaL1205
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!
  • bwiernik
    No on the first question (@Dan, could Duplicate Items and Unfiled Items get added to the Advanced Search menu, maybe as options under Saved Search?)

    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.
  • adamsmith
    (@Dan, could Duplicate Items and Unfiled Items get added to the Advanced Search menu, maybe as options under Saved Search?)
    yes, please. Would add a lot of flexibility.
  • EnyaL1205
    Thank you, bwiernik!
    That was helpful!
  • dstillman
    Have to look into the feasibility of this, code-wise and performance-wise, but I've created a ticket for it.

    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.
  • bwiernik
    Agreed on calling them all Collections.
  • charpent
    This hasn't moved in 6 years. I added a [note](https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1087#issuecomment-1293457225) to the ticket, hoping to prod it towards the top of the stack...
  • qqbb
    I'm not sure if the Duplicate Items collection can be easily added as a search condition in Zotero's advanced search. In Duplicate Items, potential duplicates are grouped together. You wouldn't expect that in an advanced search.

    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.
  • quochung2310
    Hi! It has been a while since this "issue" was discussed. I strongly agree that the feature "find duplicate reference within collection or sub-collection" is really useful to manage different projects without needing to create a group library.

    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!
  • ulahcherubim
    Zotero 7 Beta has a collections tab in item pane(right side) which shows all the collections the item is in. You can easily remove the item from any collection via a button in this tab.
  • dsleonard
    edited September 6, 2024
    The last comment is not a great solution. It doesn't work from Duplicate items view, and in a collection view, you must click each item one at a time, not knowing yet if it is a duplicate, and for each item it goes back to info view, so you must then click the collections tab again. Even this doesn't seem to work for inexact duplicates that the duplicate items view does find. I'm not sure it even works for duplicates at all. You can have an item referenced from multiple collections without it being a duplicate. It does show those, which the duplicate window does not.

    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.
  • dstillman
    @dsleonard: The Libraries and Collections section works in the Duplicate Items view. You just have to actually select a single item, by deselecting items with the standard OS modifier keys or using up/down-arrow to select a single item.

    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.
  • dsleonard
    edited September 6, 2024
    @dstillman Ah, great. Thank you. This helps some. I was sure down arrow was going to the next set of dupes earlier, but I probably imagined it after the mouse was doing that. It still has the issue that the info tab keeps popping up by default with every arrow press.
  • dsleonard
    Ah... and now I find that you can pin the collections tab after right clicking on it. Now it's something useable. The remaining nitpick is I haven't found a way to sort so that dupes appear next to each other, which would make reviewing them with down arrow a little more convenient, but this already helps a lot.
  • vsri
    For me it is not just one systematic review, but several that I am working on at the same time. So truly, being able to identify duplicates in each collection would be just great
    I make collections - for each review - for each database searched as well as one where I merge all results - and that is the collection I would love to be able to check for duplicaters
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