Detecting duplicates in only one folder / project

CadiMoy
One issue I come across is that if I am doing more than one systematic review the duplicates are detected across folders however I only wish to find duplicates within one project. It would be great if this was an option and if it already is please can someone tell me how?! Or other tricks to get around this issue?!

Thank you.
  • adamsmith
    edited April 16, 2015
    (we really should make "Duplicate" and "Unfiled" available as search conditions, that'd solve this and several other issues).

    Only thing I can think of is tagging items belonging to a given project in addition to placing them in collections.
  • CadiMoy
    Thanks for your suggestions. What would be ideal for me is an option to 'detect duplicates' in folder X or 'detect duplicates' across all folders. Tagging is going to take too long I think. :(
  • adamsmith
    well, you can use colored tags or drag to a tag (on the left) to mass-assign, so tagging can be pretty quick.
    I don't think we'd build in a collection specific "detect duplicates" but with Duplicates available in searches, you could create that as a saved search.

    Note, btw., that collections are not folders, which would seem quite relevant for your situation: https://www.zotero.org/support/collections_and_tags#the_zotero_collections_model
    Merging a duplicate will keep it in all collections.
  • CadiMoy
    Ok that makes things easier. The thing I can't get my head around is the duplicates - I don't need to know if there is a duplicate in a collection not related to the one I'm working on because I want to know how many duplicates there on a specific question's search results in a specific collection which includes 4 databases of searches so will be duplicates but since the topics are interlinked there are likely to be duplicates in other collections. Apologies if this doesn't make sense!!
  • DWL-SDCA
    @CadiMoy I'm puzzled by your comment concerning "four databases of searches". I am guessing that you might mean that you downloaded records from 4 different online bibliographic databases and you imported each into its own collection.

    As adamsmith wrote above. Collections are not like folders or directories. Collections are similar to iTunes playlists. Just as a single song can be in several different playlists; a single item in your Zotero can be in several collections (without the item having a duplicate in your library database). You don't want duplicates in your library because you don't want to insert the same item as a citation from more than one of a duplicate record in your Zotero database. Using the Zotero duplicate utility to merge duplicates seems like the best idea. Following that strategy, you can still have the items in each database's collection; however the item in each collection will be the same Zotero record instead of different (duplicated) records of the same item that you downloaded from different bibliographic databases.

    I use this process to compare the relevant contents of different databases for a given topic. How much do the contents overlap? How much is lost by searching only one or two databases? Are there key items in a database that otherwise omits other key items? Etc. This is essential information when conducting a systematic review on a multidisciplinary topic.
  • CadiMoy
    Sorry to confuse, it was more that I want to be sure that in one collection with searches imported from four databases that I know how many duplicates are within this specific collection. Since I have other collections that will likely have similar papers this will mean there is a duplicate but not from the collection I am looking at. I think that I have got it now I was just worried in terms of keeping track of numbers but with colour tags I think it works. Thanks for your comments.
  • RussellPinto
    I finally found a solution to this. its not complicated. create a new group library for each study. that way you could search the duplicate files only for that study. I repeat, not a new collection, but a new library option available in Zotero
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