false duplicates

ftrxx
A control of duplicates results in false positives: two entries for the same author and the same title, but one is a journal article, the other a book, and both have different years of publication.
How is that possible ?

Regards
ftr
  • breizinski
    I do not know why this happens, but I can confirm this issue. I have a conference paper and a thesis with the same title, and zotero also flags them as duplicates.

    The odd thing is, it's not only the item type that is different, but also the author: the thesis has a single author, while the conference paper has an additional three authors.

    After trying a couple of variations, my assumption is that zotero looks at the title and whether there is at least one author in both publications, regardless of potential other authors.

    My advise would be to simply ignore it, but perhaps this is a bigger issue for you?
  • adamsmith
    There are going to be some false positives in duplicate detection, that's unavoidable (both of these cases -- different item types/year or incomplete author list -- could absolutely be due to importing from sites with poor metadata).
    There is an open ticket to allow you to mark an item as non-duplicate so they will no longer show up as such, but I can't give you a promise of when that will actually be implemented.
  • jm777
    I am also having this problem, not only as you state, but to me, even worse, with patents. Patent numbers get stuffed into the "Extra" field. Two patents with the same title are marked as duplicates even though the patent number is different.This is a big issue for me as I deal with many patents and I am amazed how long the duplicates list is.
  • adamsmith
    wait -- but patent numbers should also be in the patent number field. Aren't they?
  • jm777
    Please consider putting a check box on each of the fields that when clicked on or off, makes that a field that is included (or not) in the duplcates finder. Thanks!
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