Tag: deduplication

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

Ricardo Vidal7 Comments

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: