Comparison/subtraction of citation collections?

alexburns

Hi there,

There could be a thread regarding this which I am yet to find the correct search terms for but...

A colleague is performing a systematic review and using Zotero to manage her citations. She did her searches and then went through the list of citations ("search 1") removing inappropriate papers on the basis of title and abstract.

Her supervisor then changed/expanded some of the search criteria (typical!). She has redone the searches ("search 2"), but does not want to waste all her prior sifting efforts.

Can Zotero compare two lists of citations and give a list of those which are different between the two? She really wants to create a list of citations which are unique to search 2, removing those in search 1. If so, how does one do this?

Thanks in advance for anyone who can answer or point me in the direction of a thread which covers this.

bwiernik

She can do this in two steps.

1. Open the Duplicate Items special collection in the left pane (right click on My Library/the Group Name if it's not visible). Merge the Duplicate Items together.

2. Now, she will have items that are part of both the Search 1 and Search 2 collections (because the items have been merged). She can use the Advanced Search button to search for items that are part of the Search 2 collection, but not the Search 1 collection. She can save this as a Saved Search to make a folder that will contain this subset of items.

alexburns

Thanks you so much for this. We have not met again to try this but will let you know.

bwiernik

I primarily use Zotero for systematic reviews. If you send me an email or private message here, I'd be happy to share some of my organization methods or answer specific questions.