I’m having difficulty with merge entries in multiple ways. Somehow jabref has created multiple copies of the same record, some with associated pdf files, some not. Several records have 3 or more copies. I want to merge them in bulk because I have hundreds of these issues happening and I don’t want to have to click through them individually. There’s a checkbox in the merge entries window at the top right that says ‘treat all entries the same’ which I’d expect to just continue with the merge procedure for all records once I click merge the first time. It does not, and I still have to click each record pair individually.
Also, I’m getting to this issue with the 'find duplicates’ procedure, which seems to run the entire library every time, even when i’ve selected a group or have several individual records selected. So even if I wanted to look at duplicates in batches this makes that untenable since it doesn’t display the duplicates in any way related to how the records are currently shown on screen.
It also doesn’t appear to be merging records when I click on the merge option. I have run through the merge procedure multiple times and keep getting the same pairs showing up repeatedly.
And I’m also struggling to find a way to stop the find duplicates procedure while it’s going. Pretty much every button either continues the procedure, moving to the next record, or also closes out the window only for it to reopen with another dupe. The only way I’ve found to stop the process is to kill it via task manager.
I have an old library that I’m trying to clean up with several thousand records, so cleanup procedures are critical for me right now, as are duplicate detection and merging records. What I’m trying to do is identify duplicates with identical title/author pairs and merge them, adding all attached files to the merged record without deleting any files. For records that have similar values or match only one of the title or author, I’d like to view possible duplicates in list form so that I can quickly highlight any to accept in bulk, and then create a (much smaller) list for line-by-line review. Ideally I’d like to be able to tag pairs as reviewed once I validate that they aren’t duplicates, because jabref has repeatedly shown me the same files as duplicates when I’ve already determined that they aren’t so I’d like to get clear them from the list from future review.
Anything you can propose to help resolve these issues would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
FYI I’m running JabRef 5.15 on Windows 11