Importing Mendeley item identifiers

tina_cardona
Hi there,

I want to update one of my existing Zotero group libraries so that the item identifiers from its previous Mendeley library come in. I found out about this from a previous forum discussion: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/430115#Comment_430115. I read all the documentation about fixing my database in case it goes wrong but am still a little unclear.

This update involves about 3,000 items in a 4,000-item group library so I want to be very careful. Also, FYI, I am a member of 30 other group libraries, most of which I own. I already backed up my Zotero data directory but wonder if there are any other safeguards I can take beforehand to lessen the amount of time and effort needed to fix things if something goes wrong. I assume I could turn off syncing while I do the import but I don't understand what I would need to do afterwards if I see things are very messed up.

Thanks!
Tina
  • dstillman
    Did you import directly from Mendeley into the group library before, using Zotero's built-in importer? Only one of your groups appears to have items from the Mendeley importer (likely from just before we updated it to preserve links, unless someone was using the beta), so only that one could be relinked.

    Other than having a backup for good measure, the only thing to make sure of is that you either choose the relink option if it appears or, if it doesn't, the download-items-only option, to avoid changing any existing items beyond relinking.
  • tina_cardona
    No, I did not use the built-in Mendeley importer for this portion of the group library. The other part, I did use the importer using the beta, but pulled it into My Library instead of directly into the group as a safeguarding measure, if that makes a difference.

    So if I didn't use the built-in importer, the relinking can't happen?
  • dstillman
    No, sorry. If you didn't use the built-in importer, those items don't have anything to do with Mendeley as far as Zotero is concerned. The only change here was pulling in an additional id from Mendeley that lets us preserve links in Mendeley-created documents, but if you don't have Mendeley items to begin with then none of this is relevant.
  • dstillman
    @tina_cardona: Well, you can still use the built-in importer into the group library and then the document should be linked to those, but you'd have duplicates of all the items. You could delete the whole batch of previously imported items, but if you've actually been doing things with those items, you wouldn't want to do that.
  • tina_cardona
    Understood, thank you.

    In case you have suggestions for a fix, the reason I looked into this is my colleagues recycle portions of reports with Mendeley citations in new reports where they add Zotero citations (from the same group library). This causes some duplication in the bibliography I'd like to prevent from happening if I can, but it sounds like it's unavoidable.

    Also, I did considerable clean up of this Mendeley library when I pulled it into Zotero so I wouldn't want to redo all that work. Could I theoretically do as you say and pull in the entire library again using the importer, then resolve all the duplicates?
  • dstillman
    This causes some duplication in the bibliography I'd like to prevent from happening if I can, but it sounds like it's unavoidable.
    Yes, I'm afraid that's unavoidable. Zotero can read the Mendeley citations, and so it will add those to the bibliography, but it doesn't have any way of linking those to a library that wasn't imported with our importer.
    Could I theoretically do as you say and pull in the entire library again using the importer, then resolve all the duplicates?
    Theoretically, yes. (But we don't yet have batch merging, though it's hopefully coming soon.)

    This is generally just a bit trickier in a group anyway. If you or someone else did use the (post-December-2022) built-in importer to import the Mendeley items into their personal library, and then refreshed a document with citations for any of those items, Zotero would then relink the citations to the personal library. If you know that hasn't happened yet, I suppose that would be one reason to do this now and do the refresh yourself, to try to head it off.

    Or you could just try to replace citations manually from the group library when you notice them. You should be able to toggle Word field codes and search for "mendeley" to identify citations that are still linked to Mendeley.

    We're also working on a feature to make it easier to identify orphaned citations in documents and relink citations between libraries, which might help when reusing portions of old documents.
  • tina_cardona
    Ah thank you for telling me about toggling Word field codes - that will help. I was actually going to ask if there was a way to find the old citations easier.

    I'm very glad I came here to ask about this task before I started because I would have done a lot of work in vain if you hadn't set me straight. Thanks again!
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