Problem adding 2 works in same citation that differ only in date

Feature requests
1

I have two books to cite, that are identical in every respect except the publication date. I cite the first, then I add another citation to it, and get the message: “Whoops — this citation already contains the selected reference!” Somehow, paperpile is seeing the two (different) references as identical.

FWIW, these are the two books:

Ramus, Petrus. Scholarum physicarum libri octo. Frankfurt, 1583.

Ramus, Petrus. Scholarum physicarum libri octo. Frankfurt, 1606.

2

And what’s more, if I enter the 1583 one first, then try to make a separate citation of the 1606 edition, Paperpile selects Ramus 1583 again. I can’t cite Ramus 1606 in my document, once I have already cited Ramus 1583.

3

That’s a tough one. Paperpile tries to avoid duplicates and it assumes those two are the same. We added that because users cited different versions of duplicates and that caused massive confusion. That’s the first false positive reported by a user.

Is there any way you can change the title to make them different (e.g. add the edition in the title). That should fix it.

We’ve have to think about it and look into it into more detail but it could be a can of worms changing our duplicate algorithm avoiding a very rare false positive. I’d rather do some sort of adhoc fix.

4

It is interesting to me to see how different disciplines have different needs. For me in anthropology, I rarely care about different editions - as long as the page numbers aren’t different for the pages I want to cite. However, for a historian there is a huge difference and there really needs to be a way to have multiple editions as they would need to be cited differently. I don’t envy the developers trying to address all these differences…

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5

Thanks for the reply. I’ll give some thought to how I can differentiate them. Would a difference in some non-printed field (keywords, e.g.), be sufficient? Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be easy to number the editions (2nd, 3rd edition doesn’t make a lot of sense in the printing marketplace of the early-modern world); indeed, part of the point of the article is about the proliferation of editions that are outwardly similar, but have significant textual differences within.

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