Upgrade StorageMerging duplicates vs. deleting
Hi there,
A few of us in our research group have recently put our individual libraries together into a shared library. As a result, we have a lot of duplicates to deal with. I have read in the documentation about duplicates (https://www.zotero.org/support/duplicate_detection) that it is better to merge duplicate items than to move one of the duplicate items to the trash. When we use merge, we end up with one parent item (great!) but multiple PDFs listed under the one parent item. Having these multiple PDFs seems to still leave us with the problem of duplicates. Is it okay to move some of these to the trash once we have merged the duplicates? Also, is there more information on why it is not good to trash duplicates? Thank you in advance.
A few of us in our research group have recently put our individual libraries together into a shared library. As a result, we have a lot of duplicates to deal with. I have read in the documentation about duplicates (https://www.zotero.org/support/duplicate_detection) that it is better to merge duplicate items than to move one of the duplicate items to the trash. When we use merge, we end up with one parent item (great!) but multiple PDFs listed under the one parent item. Having these multiple PDFs seems to still leave us with the problem of duplicates. Is it okay to move some of these to the trash once we have merged the duplicates? Also, is there more information on why it is not good to trash duplicates? Thank you in advance.
It's not always a problem to delete duplicates. The biggest issue is that you lose the connection between deleted items and any word processor document you may have cited them in. Merge also preserves all collection membership of all merged items as well as all their tags.
If none of that is a concern, deleting is perfectly fine