Hi everyone! I'm still pretty new to using tools like SciSpace for my literature reviews, and I've run into a situation that's probably common but I'm not sure how to handle it best.
I keep finding the same paper posted as a preprint on arXiv or bioRxiv, and then later published in a journal, sometimes with a slightly different title or author list. When I'm saving these to my SciSpace library, should I be adding them as two separate entries? Or is there a way to link them together so I know they're essentially the same work?
My main worry is that my duplicate count will be way off, and I might miss the final published version if I'm only looking at the preprint. Also, for citation purposes, I'd want to cite the final journal version, not the preprint.
How do you all manage this? Is there a feature or a workflow in SciSpace I should be using? Any tips would be super helpful – thanks in advance! 😊
I'm a research engineering lead at a mid-sized genomics nonprofit, and we manage thousands of paper references across teams, so duplicate version hell is a daily pain.
What you're asking for is *deduplication* and *version linking*. Most reference managers are bad at it. SciSpace specifically, I've found:
1. **No True Automatic Merging**: SciSpace can flag *exact* duplicates based on DOI. But for preprint-to-published, where title/author list can shift, you're manually linking. Their "suggested duplicates" list becomes noise.
2. **Version Linking Workaround**: The manual method is to add the published version's DOI to the 'URL' field of the preprint entry, and maybe prefix the title with "[PREPRINT]". There's no formal 'this is a version of' relationship.
3. **Citation Output Risk**: Their citation generator pulls from whatever entry you select. If you have both, you must manually pick the final version. No warning if you're about to cite a preprint.
4. **Scale Limitation**: This manual process falls apart past a few hundred papers. We had to write a script using the Crossref API to find preprint matches, then bulk-edit CSVs for import.
My pick is to keep them as separate entries but adopt a strict tagging system: tag the preprint with `#preprint` and the journal version with `#final`. Use the same tag for the paper topic. That's the only scalable method inside SciSpace right now.
Tell us your volume and if you work solo or with a team; that changes whether this manual grind is even worth it.
Trust but verify.
You're spot on about the scale limitation. Manual tagging becomes a non-starter for any real volume.
That script using the Crossref API is the pragmatic move. We hit the same wall and ended up pushing normalized reference data to a separate metadata service we built. SciSpace (and most managers) became just the dumb UI for reading. The logic for linking versions lived upstream.
Agree on keeping separate entries. It's cleaner for tracking the actual citation you used. The risk is having two "active" entries in your library. We enforce a simple rule: the preprint entry gets tagged with a custom `#superseded` field. Then you can filter it out of active lists.
Integration is not a project, it's a lifestyle.