Connector: Show existing entry

albertzeyer
When I visit the website (e.g. Arxiv or DOI URL) of a paper which I already added previously to Zotero, instead of giving me the option "Save to Zotero", I would like that a click on the Zotero button would take me to my existing entry, and not create a new duplicate.

Maybe this function already exists and I somehow missed it?
  • albertzeyer
    Should I post this on GitHub instead?

    Is this so uncommon?

    How do you handle that now? Just add it anyway and later find and remove duplicates? That would be a stupid and annoying solution.
  • adamsmith
    There is an issue for this on GitHub already, no need to post there.

    There currently is no simple solution, sorry.

    (Generally speaking, don't necessarily expect answers on feature requests. If the request is clear and not currently possible, there's just not much to say)
  • albertzeyer
    Ah, I searched already in the GitHub issues but did not found it. Now I looked again, and I assume you refer to this: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1007

    Also, now I also found this previous related forum post: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/68415/already-in-library-warning-for-save-to-zotero-button-in-browser-plugin

    To engage in the discussion, maybe I would directly post on GitHub? I'm a developer myself but I don't have any experience with the Zotero code.

    From glancing over the existing discussion, it sounds like it is mostly an issue for pages which contain multiple DOIs. But my most common use case would be Arxiv papers where I think there is no real ambiguity and also it's just a single entry.
  • adamsmith
    It's not just DOIs -- it's the overall concern of what to do when adding items from a multiple item selector such as google scholar search results, arXiv search results etc.
    I don't speak for core devs, but I'd be surprised if they'd accept a solution/patch that only works for single-item import: presumably batch import would be a very likely cause of duplication and having inconsistent behavior would be rather confusing.
    There used to be a "Prevent duplicates" add-on way back, and that'd definitely be an option for a provisional solution, but the old code is basically entirely useless because it only worked with the Zotero version that was entirely a Firefox add-on (so never worked with browser connectors).
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