Duplicate items in Zotero

Giuditta Parolini · November 9, 2018

I am using Zotero to compile a bibliography of agricultural meteorology (1900-1950). Often titles are the same (e.g. Weather forecasts for XYZ), but the articles were published either in different years by the same journal or in the same year by different journals. Unfortunately Zotero considers these items duplicates. I do not have DOIs as I am inputting the data from pre-existing published bibliographies of the 1920s and 1930s. It is problematic to have a very long list of false duplicates. Is there a way to solve the problem? Do you have any suggestion?

DWL-SDCA · November 10, 2018

The way I deal with this is to add the date [in square brackets] to the title of each item. This requires additional editing both of the Zotero record and maybe to the bibliography. It is common for reports by local, state, and national health agencies to publish reports with titles such as "Births" or "Deaths" without a date or geographic reference in the title. I add the additional information in brackets to the title and have never had a complaint. Yes, one can (sometimes) determine the date by the year of publication or the lcation by the name and location of the agency. I say sometimes because the date of publication of vital records data is almost always a year or three after the year for which the data is reported. I think it is silly to need to "look inside" the report to know the year of interest.

bwiernik · November 10, 2018

One option to retrieve DOIs for the items by using the DOI Manager plugin https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-shortdoi/releases

If there aren't DOIs and the items have the same title, authors, and year ±1, then unfortunately, they are going to be flagged as potential duplicates. The ability to mark items as non-duplicates is planned, but no ETA on when it will be implemented. In general, I recommend not worrying about it too much.