Merge duplicate items, even with different item type

albertzeyer

I sometimes have duplicate items with different item types:

- Report vs journal article e.g. for Arxiv. I think this might have happened due to earlier imports. Sometimes I also manually put Preprint or some other type, so for Arxiv, I often ended up having different item types.

- Preprint vs conference paper. E.g. for the Arxiv version and then the conference proceeding version. I think I have read elsewhere here that some people suggest to really keep that as separate entries. However, I personally prefer to merge them.

So, this is a feature request to make merging duplicate items with different item types possible.

Btw, it is still right to post this here and not directly as a GitHub issue? (As it is explained in the GitHub issue template: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/new)

dstillman

it is still right to post this here and not directly as a GitHub issue?

Yes.

poclecoqq

I support this. Merging duplicates with different item types is particularly cumbersome when there is a lot of them.

What is needed for this post to become a GitHub issue?

fran_alba

I also support this, I've mentioned this in a more general question on workflows to combine arXiv preprints with journal versions when the paper is published: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/99220/arxiv-preprints-and-published-journals-workflow

fran_alba

Any news on this?
Is there any way to more formally suggest an option to enable merging of entries with different item types?

adamsmith

The forums are the only way to propose and discuss features. Devs read all posts, so are obviously aware of this, though they won't necessarily respond unless there are specific questions or updates.

fran_alba

Thanks for the explanation and apologies for being so impatient.
I hope this small issue will be taken into consideration, I personally waste quite a lot of time changing item types before merging preprints and journal articles.

jazow

I think this plugin might have an option to do this:

https://github.com/frangoud/ZoteroDuplicatesMerger

One of its options is:

Select how to handle type conflicts (skip items, force type of master): this option determines what will happen if two items that are duplicates have different item types (e.g., journal article and conference paper). Skip will ignore any duplicate items leaving them as they are. 'Force type of master' will change any items that are different from the type of the master, to that one

fran_alba

@jazow Thanks a lot, this should solve my problem!