Duplication management in Mendeley Reference Manager has arrived! Users can now easily view and remove any pre-existing or newly-added duplicate references from their library, helping to keep the organizing of their references under control.
Researchers continue to be faced with more and more information, and from an increasing variety of sources. So it’s an easy mistake to make to add duplicate references to an already extensive library. A mistake, however, that can lead to confusion and errors when inserting citations in a paper.
That’s why we’ve introduced a new duplication management feature in Mendeley Reference Manager that can help you identify and remove any duplicate references that threaten to disrupt your workflow. And with seamless integration between Mendeley Reference Manager and our citation add-in, Mendeley Cite, it’s never been easier to write your research.
“It saves me time from having to eye ball everything”
Mendeley User
How does duplication management work?
Mendeley Reference Manager identifies two references with the same DOI as duplicates.
On importing a duplicate reference into your library, a pop-up will appear at the bottom right-hand side of the screen.
Duplicate references are also automatically added into a new smart collection called ‘Duplicates’. In this smart collection, the duplicates are grouped into individual ‘sets’ of duplicates.
You can easily delete these duplicate references by selecting the trash icon.
And that’s it!
Duplication management is just one of the many features in Mendeley Reference Manager that simplify your referencing workflow. Download Mendeley Reference Manager today to see how it makes building a library simple.
Mendeley Blog 
Hi, thanks for the blog post! I’m struggling to resolve and avoid creating duplicates and have a couple questions.
Is there no longer a way to merge duplicates? I’m finding that, especially when syncing the Desktop Reference Manager with a Group, I get duplicates with minor differences, like when someone fills a blank field. It’s difficult keeping track of which references I’ve updated and which my colleagues have updated.
How can I avoid creating duplicates? I seem to get lots of duplicates when syncing Reference Manager (desktop) with the Groups.
Thank you!
Hey Christy, thanks for your comment, we are always working hard to release incredible features! Currently duplication management is only available for your personal reference library – as part of the work for duplication management, we decided to release the first version just for the personal library; we will be considering adding the feature for groups in the future.
Thank you all for your intention to optimize mendeley reference manager!
As mentioned by Christiy, the old option of merging was perfect, as sometimes you have one version with tags added or annotations, and another with more meta data but not the tags. To merge them was easy and intiutive and one could just merge all found duplicates without the risk of losing information. Now, I have to check both version, look in which the more important meta data is written, and then decide, whether to keep the version with tags but incomplete meta, or the one with better meta data but have ot add tags manually. Time consumption x1000…
This app has declined in functionality in so many ways, not to mention its complete uselessness for ipad (annotiating not possible ?!!?), so hopefully we reach at least the functionality it had before to be able to start improving. Anyways, always loved Mendeley, so im still a believer 🙂
Hey FK, thanks for commenting and we’re happy to hear that you love Mendeley! We completely understand that it can take time to check and decide on which reference needs to remain, which is why we’re glad to say that the merge duplicates function is coming to MRM in the near future. We wanted to focus on getting Duplication Management out to users as soon as we could, which is why the merge function is not yet available however we are hoping to release it by the end of the year.
Thank you for including duplicate management! Do you plan on including a way to merge duplicate references (instead of just deleting one)? I often end up having duplicates in different collections, and it would be useful to have the ability to keep them in all of those collections with the one entry
Hey Rachel, thanks for your comment. We are happy to say that the merge duplicates function is coming to MRM in the near future. We wanted to focus on getting Duplication Management out to users as soon as we could, which is why the merge function is not yet available however we are hoping to release it by the end of the year.
The work you’ve placed into this post is clear, and it’s abundantly regarded. I’ll offer this to my fans!