duplicates

sthorne
Is there a way to remove duplicates from My Library (resulting from multiple attempts to import an Endnote library)?
  • noksagt
    There isn't automated duplicate detection yet. This is planned. You can manually select multiple records & delete them.
  • sthorne
    Thank you.
  • andywingate
    another vote for some kind of feature to help prevent or remove duplicates - also that allows the consolidation of different tags and attachments from duplicates into a single entry
  • scot
    Right. Me too, though note that any really useful implementation seems quite a big task, since online metadata (in my experience) varies widely in quality. I very often (as you said) have to combine elements form two different records for the same item. How to manage that simply in a UI, I'm sure I don't know. Of course it can be done, and it will be, but it'll be a while yet. Detecting complete identicals should be easier, at least in the UI requirements.
  • fjbuch
    Me too. I would like a duplicate remover or perhaps a little safer would be a duplicate detector
  • neurosceptic
    To add to this an issue. If one has a number of duplicates and removes them, any documents that linked to the removed reference will presumably loose the link. This could be problematic.

    A suggestion might be that a duplicate remover kept a record of what it had removed. This way, we could look up the unique ID to see what was actually referenced in the document. Perhaps?
  • neurosceptic
    Actually, even more helpful than a duplicate remover would be a tool to prevent duplicates in the first place. This would be perfect for me.
  • dnh
    Yes, preventing duplicates in the first place would be great. Often, I don't remember/know which reference I used and if you delete the wrong one, the citation gets deleted in the text - that creates (sometimes a lot) extra work.
  • silence
    Has this been implemented yet?

    Cheers,

    S
  • kmarr
    Just as a thought, could this be implemented as a duplicate combiner rather than remover? This way any document linking to a duplicate won't get lost. So rather than deleting the duplicate, remove it and make sure that both references link to the combined one...
  • andresmh
    Another vote for auto-detection of dupes :)
  • bioshaena
    Another vote to avoid or merge duplicates!! and to consolidate tags.... Has there been any improvement on this ???

    S
  • kmarr
    You can already consolidate tags: right-click on any tag, and rename it with the name of an existing tag.
  • konstantinos_29
    Another vote for it...
  • pamblundell
    any news on this yet? another vote...
  • noksagt
    There are already some duplicate detection functions in the trunk & it is being worked on more. Refer to this thread:
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/42/duplicate-detection/
This discussion has been closed.