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
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.
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?
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.
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...
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?
Cheers,
S
S
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/42/duplicate-detection/