Merging duplicates and notes

shazam12

I have two versions of same journal article in different folders (different topics like Politics & Religion). The note attached to the journal in folder 1 is different from the one in folder 2. Now if I merge the duplicate, the notes are getting merged too and I am unable to tell which note belonged to the Politics folder and which to Religion folder. Any way around this ? If none, I just cannot merge the duplicates. The notes are too valuable to guide me how to approach the article.

dstillman

Now if I merge the duplicate, the notes are getting merged too and I am unable to tell which note belonged to the Politics folder and which to Religion folder.

Right, so the way you're thinking about this isn't how Zotero works. Child notes don't belong to collections — they belong to their parent items, and those items can exist in multiple collections. You don't want to have more than one version of the same item in your library.

If you're taking child notes on different subjects and are having trouble keeping them separate, one option would be to apply colored tags to the notes, which will help you keep them differentiate them in the items list. (You could also just use a prefix in the note itself that will show up in the first line.)

You can also create standalone notes in individual collections, and optionally add related items to those.

shazam12

The problem is that imported a large number of .ris files from several disciplines and each parent entry has a note that was created by the author of the bibliography for the topic. They all cite some popular work but with a different note and I want to see how each author interprets the particular work from the note and correlate that to the topic. Total 240,000 parent items and 60,000 duplicates. At this point I am just considering not attaching any pdfs to any duplicates at all. Is there a way to select a single parent entry and check if it has any duplicate before I add any pdf to it? or do I have to go to duplicates menu and hunt that entry down among all other duplicates ? It's gonna be very complicated. My zotero app takes good 4 minutes to load and be functional.

shazam12

bump

adamsmith

Is there a way to select a single parent entry and check if it has any duplicate before I add any pdf to it?

Nothing built in. You could just search by title, of course, which should pretty much achieve the same.