Duplicate Detection in Zotero 4

bergpolder

I have a lot of false positives for duplicate detection in Zotero that I can't get rid of (and don't want them sitting there in the duplicate detection window because I need to use that to detect real duplicates).

One example is two entries for author "Zižek, Slavoj" one a 'book' type and one a 'video recording' with a url. The former is 2009 and the latter 2010 and they have similar but not identical titles (same words, but different punctuation and capitalisation and spacing).

What's worse is that I can't merge them anyway because "Merged items must all be of the same item type." So, even if I change them about, add the ISBN for the book, and add other distinguishing details, they remain identified as duplicates no matter what.

It also didn't work if I deleted one record and made it again manually.

How can I resolve this? I feel like there should be an option to say "Not duplicates"...

adamsmith

Sorry, there just isn't a great solution for this. You could use a "No duplicate" colored tag so that you'd at least be able to tell quickly which ones aren't real duplicates, but as of now that's the best there is.

Dan just opened a ticket for this (possibly partly in response to your post, which isn't the first request of something like this). No way of telling how quickly this will happen (some tickets get implemented in days, some take several years), but generally devs agree this should happen: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1122

(I assume you don't _want_ to merge the non-duplicates, but if you did, you could change the item type and then merge).

bergpolder

Thanks for the reply and glad to hear that even if there's no simple solution, that it's being looked at :)

And yeah, you're correct that I don't want to merge them (they aren't duplicates!).