Just today I created duplicate tags, as well as duplicate book entries in a shared folder. Seems there needs to be better checking to see if items are duplicates or not.
I second this feature is a must! Can we get an idea from the developers if checking for duplicates is anywhere on the horizon? For starters, it would be helpful to be able to merge duplicates manually, at the very least.
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This problem becomes more pressing as I use Paperpile more. Today I attempted to upload data in RIS format from my desktop reference manager. It worked OK, but created numerous duplicates which had to be found and deleted manually. I was only able to do this by sorting by title and going through the list by hand.
Paperpile flags duplicates automatically. Of course this is not an exact science and subject to a limited sensitivity/specificity. But generally it works well. Would be interesting why your duplicates have not been detected. There might be a reason for it why Paperpile did not pick them up.
I think it has to do with an error in the import of Sente’s RIS export. Next time I’ll try using another export format…
+1 for giving us a way to merge duplicates manually. Automatic detection is great, but it’s really irritating when a duplicate is not detected and I have to find a way to merge the information myself. What is the cost here?
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In principle give this feature a +1 also and it is already on our internal list of features we want to add. It is just a matter of resources and it has to been seen in the context of the ever growing list of feature requests.
There is a little trick that might be helpful. You can force two items to be detected as duplicates by adding a common identifier (e.g. url or doi). Then they will appear in the list of duplicates and you can merge them.
E.g. just add “google.com” to the URL fields of both items and they should be flagged as duplicates immediately.
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There is the related matter of duplicates in the shared folders… this one gets messy for us… it would be great to have some better controls there… as it is, I can’t even see a way to search for duplicates in a shared folder.
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Duplicate search is currently not available (or planned) for shared folders.
why is it not planned for shared folders? The majority of use cases that we have are shared folders and there aren’t abiility to do autodownloads, checking for duplicates, etc. It’s EXTREMELY frustrating.
We are painfully aware of the limitations of shared folders. The ones you mention are only some of them. The forum is full of other issues like you can’t easily collaborate on a Google Doc from a shared folder, you can’t share labels, etc.
To fix these issues we are working on a complete rewrite of the sharing system. That’s the only reason why we have not planned any fixes for existing shared folders at the moment.
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ah I see, do you have an ETA for the rewrite?
It affects many aspects of the app and it’s a major undertaking. But we have a clear plan and I hope I can share more details on the roadmap with you soon.
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