Discovering duplicates and merging

Discovering duplicates

Descriptions in the database should be unique. Each person, publication or institution should be described only once. If we see different variants of the same description in the database, then they should be merged into one record. The merging procedure allows one to select from the duplicates the fields that should appera in the target unique record.

Causes of duplicates may include:

• automatic downloading of data from other systems (like Scopus)

• manual importing data from other systems

• typos in the description

• entering data by authors (autofilling)

• other data recording

• mistakes by editors entering descriptions.

One can easily idetify diplicates among objects of a given type. Having the identified one can indicate duplicates and then merge them. To do so, you can proceed as foolow:

1. on the editor panel select the type of objects you want to discover duplicates;

2. perform search of objects (preferably covering the whole set of the objects. In order to make the process more efficient you can select a subset, e.g. for the publications choose a range of publication dates

3. Select all the retrieved object (preferably) or a limited part

   Open

   

4. from the 3-dots menu select the option

   Open

   

5. On the window as below confirm detect duplicates

6. On the screen as below identify the duplicates, check them and use the option Merge Selected Records

7. Select the target record (as below) - it should be the one that loos more complete

8. Use the option Interactive merge

9. On the left column you see the Field names, the middle column contains Target values , the right column shows the option values from other dulicate record(s).

   1. the triangle sign on the left column preceeding the field name means that the name is composed. it is strongly recomended that before transferring the fields from duplicate to target you “open” the composed fields, so that you can see all the components inthe field

   2. the sign x at the value in the middle column can be used to remove the value from the target

   3. The sign v at the value in the middle column can be used to open the alternative fields to move the value to another field

   4. The sign + at the value in the right column means that you can add it to the target record to the field as it is in the duplicate

   5. The sign v at the value in the righ column means that before transferring to the target you can rename it (send to an alternative field)

   6. with the above functions you can build the target record

10. having completed building the target you can Apply Reset or Cancel

If you apply your specifications for the target (using Apply ) then on the screen as in p. 6 use the option merge selected records (also in history) is to merge the records.