Feature of the week: Handle "duplicate" publications within groups

As you will surely experience every day, working in teams is common in many fields. The same holds for scientific and research environments; an especially important task in this context is to collaboratively create a shared publication repository, which collects relevant works in your area of interest. Among others, we're currently supporting this setup by our group feature.

Groups within BibSonomy are mainly intended to "collect" each member's resources. A core principle hereby is that each resource can only be changed / edited by its creator. This means that generally, there isn't something like a "group post", but rather a set of individual posts. As a consequence, if more than one group members have a particular publication in their repository, it will appear several times. Consider our KDE group as an example - the URL

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde/myown+2009+similarity

yields "duplicate" entries, because several group members own this post:

While this may be desired in some cases, in others it isn't. When creating a publications list from the group repository, it would be cool to be able to "filter out" duplicate entries. As you will know - if it's cool, then we can do it :) the trick is to use the parameter duplicates=no:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde/myown+2009+similarity?duplicates=no

As you see, each entry is now contained only once - we basically select the first one of a set of duplicates and display it. Of course a backdraft hereby is that only the tags of the selected person are visible, and not the ones of the others. In order to "aggregate" the tags of all people who have annotated this post, use the parameter duplicates=merged:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde/myown+2009+similarity?duplicates=merged

Looks pretty similar - BUT now, the tags corresponds to the summarized annotation by all members. With this and our other features, I hope we can make you a bit mor satisfied!

Happy tagging, Dominik