URL bar indicator if website already in collection

I frequently use the Zotero Chrome extension to add websites to my collection. It happens quite often, however, that I cannot remember anymore if I have added a particular website already to my collection when accessing it for the second or third time.

At the moment I have to switch from Chrome to Zotero and first search whether the page is in my collection.

It would be much more convenient, if an icon in the URL bar could indicate that the given page (as identified by its URL) is already in the collection.

Is something like this technically feasible?
  • we've discussed this. There are basically two strategies:
    1. To actually check this not when displaying the URL bar icon, but when importing. That actually exists as an add-on for Firefox (though good chance it may not work anymore) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/zotero-dev/yJLUTttGMXk
    Unfortunately, that requires a lot of work to implement in the connectors. If fully functional, I'm pretty sure this would be accepted into Zotero, though, so if someone is motivated...

    2. To check URL and maybe DOI when displaying the URL bar icon (and potentially display an altered icon)
    That would be feasible, but the problem is that it's also unreliable - URLs might be slightly different, you can import the same item from different URLs etc. That means it will sometimes work and sometimes not, which arguably is worse that nothing, or at least not worth the effort. Dan at least did not sound excited about this (and he does have the last word). If Zotero won't implement or accept it, there's always the option to write a plugin.
  • Thanks for your two suggestions.

    The first indeed sounds much more promising, particularly considering that websites nowadays are often created dynamically, implying that the second method would certainly often fail.

    I contacted the developer of the plugin and I will report here once we came up with a working solution.

    For everybody interested, the discussion is on Github: https://github.com/chrisjr/zotero-prevent-duplicates/issues/3
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