Copying citations loses edits that I have made?

I have two master copies of my bibliography. One is in the 'My Library' folder and one is in a folder called 'Master Bibliography' which I have made public so my PhD supervisor can see my sources and add any that I'm missing. I like having two copies - one just for me, and one that is accessible for my supervisor.

The other day my supervisor added several items to the public 'Master Bibliography' folder which needed editing to add missing information. I edited them and then copied them to the 'My Library' folder, but the copied items didn't include the edits that I had made. The new information that I had entered was missing.

I don't understand why this is happening. Can anyone help?
  • edited February 12, 2018
    The items are linked, and Zotero won't currently replace an existing item with a linked one, so you'll need to delete the item in your library and empty the trash before copying the one back from the group library. (We know this isn't ideal and plan to improve it.)
  • Though, actually, if you do that you'll lose links to the item in your doc, so, don't do that. I think you'll need to apply any changes manually.
  • edited February 12, 2018
    Actually it might work, and you could try it with a single item, confirming that, if you then make another edit to the item in My Library and refresh your document, it reflects the changes. But really the normal workflow (at least until there's better merging across libraries) would just be to cite from items in a group library if you intended to collaborate on them, so this isn't extensively tested, and I probably wouldn't risk it.
  • @dstillman Can you elaborate what you mean by _The items are linked_? Even when I duplicate an item (right-click menu), Zotero won't let me drag-drop the duplicate. But I can create a duplicate using the Connector. So, these duplicates are different from each other?

    Also, I am unable to understand the steps in your above comment, so please clarify.

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.

Sign In or Register to comment.