Already In Zotero

satikusala
I think this is a feature request. Is there a way for Zotero's browser extension to signal that the item/URL/page in question may already be in the Zotero database? I'm trying to find a way to identify if I already have an item in my database.
  • mark
    Something like a preflight check has been often discussed but instead Zotero has implemented after the fact duplicate detection that works reasonably smoothly: https://www.zotero.org/support/duplicate_detection

    There has been talk of a plugin to do this work (e.g. see https://ideophone.org/zotero-duplicate-detection/ ) but I am note sure any plugin has every materialised.
  • satikusala
    Thanks, yes duplication does work reasonably well. I appreciate your response.

    Unfortunately, this is after the fact. I'd love to be warned before creating the duplicate.
  • adamsmith
    Yeah, there's a long-standing issue for this (https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1007 -- please don't post to the github issue unless you're interested in developing the feature) and it is still planned.

    (There used to be an add-on in the very early days for Zotero ("Prevent Duplicates") but that only worked while Zotero was running entirely inside Firefox, so that is of no use even as a template)
  • tim820
    edited November 27, 2022
    I wrote a keyboard macro that automates what I was already doing manually when I thought I probably already had a paper in Zotero. When on the paper's web page in my browser, I select the text title of the paper; then a keyboard shortcut invokes a macro that copies the title text to the clipboard, switches to Zotero, inserts the title into the quick search field, and runs the search for that title (in the active library/collection). It is written in Quick Access Popup but there are obviously other keyboard macro tools depending on your OS. It's a bit clunky and not particularly fast (and sometimes fails for small discrepancies in the title), so I don't run it that often.

    It would be great if the Zotero Connector could automate such a check.
  • schumman
    I would like to write in support of Zotero to add this feature. Much appreciate the tool and the effort that goes into it
    Namaste
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