Merged duplicates reappearing

Hello,

I have a huge amount of duplicates--unfortunately, these duplicates were already in place in Mendeley and we are now converting to Zotero, so this has nothing to do with the Zotero import. While it's been a headache to manually go through all duplicates and merge one-by-one, it's been even more disheartening to see that for many of my duplicates that have been merged, upon reopening Zotero on the same workstation, I see duplicates reappear. So for example, if I have an article X that I've merged, it will be removed from the duplicate list, and I also successfully sync my library. Then, at a later time, I will see article X and its duplicate once again in the duplicate list, as if I never removed it at all. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated, thank you!!
  • You didn't happen to import the same database from Mendeley on multiple computers? Or multiple people within the same group in Mendeley imported theirs?
  • Interestingly, in the Main Library, the duplicate appears merged--it is just that the duplicate list is not updating. While this shouldn't necessarily be a problem, it's difficult to keep track what has been merged and what has not been merged, as there are thousands of duplicates.
  • edited May 8, 2019
    Hi Adam,

    The database from Mendeley was imported on one computer, and I've been working on merging the duplicates on a different computer. Truthfully, I'm not sure how the duplicates occurred on Mendeley (this is a task I'm completing for my supervisor). Interestingly, the "date added" dates for almost all of the duplicates are the same--there's one date in 2015 and another in 2018, so it seems that somehow the entire library was duplicated at one point while working with Mendeley. Not all duplicates are like this, but most of them are. I've considered just sorting by Date Added and deleting all the copies added in 2015, which could hopefully remove most duplicates, but I'd be worried that I'd lose any attachments that are on the 2015 version and not the 2018 one.
  • @dstillman would have to say how to troubleshoot the non-refreshing duplicate list. I assume you've tried restarting Zotero.
  • Yes, I've restarted Zotero (exiting the standalone and restarting the program) several times. It actually seems to be that restarting is precisely what triggers some of the duplicates to re-emerge in the duplicate list. Duplicates consistently disappear from the duplicate list during a session, and it's not until I exit the program and return that I'll notice some of the duplicates have reappeared.
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