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26 March 2012 by Ricardo

How-to series: How to check for duplicate entries and merging [part 4 of 12]

Here goes the fourth entry of our twelve-part how-to series. Let us take a look at how you to look for duplicate entries and merging whenever we do come across repeat entries.

As your reference library grows, it can happen that you add the same research article to your library more than once. Sometimes you’ll have a preprint and the final published example added. In general, Mendeley does its best to avoid having duplicate entries in your library and will tend to merge entries when they have the exact same metadata. However, every now and then some research articles make it in twice with minor differences between them that Mendeley Desktop can’t detect immediately. For these cases, you can go ahead and use the deduplication tool.

This tool, is quite self explanatory, however there are some details you may want to take note of: 1) it’s context specific. Meaning that it will only look for duplicates within the collection or folder you have currently selected; 2) It provides you with the option to select the document details you want to keep from each of the duplicates, thus allowing to maximize the completeness of your documents’ details;

So how do you use the deduplication tool? Here’s a quick run-down:

  1. In Mendeley Desktop, select the folder which you’d like to search for duplicates. It can be “All Documents”, a specific folder or even a sub-folder.
  2. Go to you Tools menu and select Deduplication tool.
  3. You will see a listing of the duplicates found (if any!). Select the one you’d like to examine and notice the checkboxes next to the document details in the right-hand panel.
  4. Select the details that you would like to keep from each of the documents.
  5. Click merge to stay with one only merged entry containing the complete document details in your library only once.
  6. Select the next duplicate set of references and repeat steps 3-5.

Here are a couple short videos exemplifying how this feature works. Nothing like an organized library of references, huh?

How to find duplicates:

How to merge duplicate entries:

Our next entry will show you how to quickly copy and paste formatted citations anywhere!

Previous How-to series entries:

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2012 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Tips&Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “How-to series: How to check for duplicate entries and merging [part 4 of 12]”

  1. osm Says:
    March 26th, 2012 at 9:00 pm

    It would be very useful if the notes and highlighting the we add to in-press pdfs could be merged into the final published form of the pdf

  2. Jeff Says:
    March 28th, 2012 at 5:23 pm

    The de-duplication tool works great for removing actual duplicates, but falls short on dealing with false positives.

    Two problems:

    (1) There is no way to see a list of the papers that have been marked as “Not a duplicate” and fix any potential errors. (short of resetting the desktop client)

    (2) The “Not a Duplicate” decisions are saved on local machines and are not sync’d to the server. This is especially annoying for Shared Groups because work is duplicated (pun!) for every group member and because real false-positives will eventually be merged by accident by someone in the group.

    #2 can’t happen? I have a group with over 7000 articles and approaching 100 members. It used to have over 50 false-positives. Now it has like 10.

  3. Mr. Gunn Says:
    April 10th, 2012 at 4:56 pm

    This is an interesting problem and one we hope to be able to solve soon. As you can imagine, different fields have different ways of distinguishing the various versions of a given document, but applying a combination of library science and machine learning shoudl allow us to crack this.

    Would you mind submitting that to our support site?