Upgrade StorageWhy are reviews identified as duplicates?
All reviews in my library have 'Author' different from the author of the reviewed work, who is typically entered as the 'Reviewed Author', the item type of the review is typically different, and the reviews are tagged as 'review-book' in the Extra field. Yet both the book and its reviews are identified as duplicates. This clutters the 'Duplicate Items' results and makes it less useful which is pity, because I find the deduplicating feature really useful.
Tbh, I think that we need to look at reviews differently from the other kinds of entries we have. They're clearly not an item type, since types are defined by medium, not by content or relation to other texts. But the explicitly derivatory nature of reviews does, I think, need to be more visible both to the programme (to solve the duplicates problem) and the user. As far as the latter is concerned, I suspect that many of us use Zotero not merely in order to generate bibliographies in text documents, but also as a tool for organizing the process of research: Questions like: Have I collected everything relevant for my next project? How much of this stuff do I still need to read? What can I recommend to my students? are answered by looking at the interface, not by producing a Word file, and here it would be really helpful to be able to see *at a glance* (i.e. without needing to click related items or notice in the sidebar that there's also a reviewed author) that a particular item is a review (and not some piece of important original research that just happens to have the same title as some other important piece of original research which I was sure I had read but here it is again by some other person …)
It's been suggested that one use tags to indicate reviews. I've been using Zotero since 2012; over the years I've developed an (I guess) moderately complex tag system that relates to the stages in my workflow that a text is involved in. I really don't want to start using a visible tag for anything else: those little coloured dots signal a very specific kind of information to me and I don't want to mix it up with information about genre. I've been adding "Review" to "extras" and have added the latter as a column in the main interface; this is admittedly clumsy, but it does produce the kind of "first glance"-impression I want. I'd actually prefer it if the icon for the item-type had a small arrow or other symbol (like the alias-icon on MacOS) to indicate a review, but this may be too complicated.