Accept all duplicates
I have looked through a few threads and haven't found any reference to an existing option to accept all duplicates, though several people over the last few years have requested such a feature. If it already exists then please let me know and apologies for not finding it already. If not...
I realise that one line of advice given to such people is to minimise duplicates at point of upload to Zotero, but for some (like me) this may not be an option. My situation is that I need to catalogue the records returned by 50 individual (very overlapping) searches, but also want to treat the combined records returned by all searches as a single collection (without duplicates). The subcollections facility is fantastic in this regard (I have uploaded the results from each search into a separate subcollection of one, big parent collection, and confirmed that merging duplicates in the parent collection still leaves each record in all relevant subcollections. Given that Zotero can automatically detect duplicates, an option to simply accept and merge all of them with one click of button would be massively helpful.
Thanks,
Mark
I realise that one line of advice given to such people is to minimise duplicates at point of upload to Zotero, but for some (like me) this may not be an option. My situation is that I need to catalogue the records returned by 50 individual (very overlapping) searches, but also want to treat the combined records returned by all searches as a single collection (without duplicates). The subcollections facility is fantastic in this regard (I have uploaded the results from each search into a separate subcollection of one, big parent collection, and confirmed that merging duplicates in the parent collection still leaves each record in all relevant subcollections. Given that Zotero can automatically detect duplicates, an option to simply accept and merge all of them with one click of button would be massively helpful.
Thanks,
Mark
When a field is only populated for one item, Zotero could be greedy and populate that field on merge (usually that is the desirable result).
What if the field is populated in more than one item and the values do not match? Which value should Zotero pick for automatic merging? There are some heuristics that we could do to determine if one value is better than the other, but, generally, Zotero needs the user to decide which value should be retained.
So, we can improve this a little bit, but, overall, I don't think that we can avoid user interaction. Similar problem exists for sync conflicts as well.
Is it a matter of technical possibility, manpower, willingness, etc? I believe in matters like this, developers need to be accountable and answerable to user needs.