I'm circling back on this issue (https://github.com/dsifford/academic-bloggers-toolkit/issues/161) though I thought it had been cleared up, but I've retested my original post. Perhaps we hadn't tested it well enough originally, or something has changed in the erstwhile to change the behavior?

In any case, here's what I'm seeing presently (with the latest Version 4.7.2, WP 4.6.1):
Books with the same title, but different authors and different other meta data can be input, but when actually inserting the citation, the superscript number for the first book input with that matching book title is appearing.

The desired book reference does (now) appear in the list of references (it wasn't before), but appears under the subsection "Uncited items". This seems like the best/most intuitive way to display it from a UI perspective.

Example:
http://boffosocko.com/2016/07/25/introduction-to-complex-analysis-ucla-extension/

Several of these books have the same title, namely "Complex Analysis".
Most show up improperly when cited as 3 (the first one I input), while incomprehensibly to me, 6 and 8 show up properly instead of as 3 as the others do that have the same title. 8 and 9 on the last book at the bottom both appear properly though 9 has a longer title which differentiates it from the other.

Bookcrossing.com is a great idea in my opinion, but can be a lot of extra work without much payoff. Before you get to deep into it, sign up for alerts of books being released in your area to see if anyone is using it. I live close to Los Angeles and surprisingly few in the area do. I see one or two releases a week within 25 miles, but by far I'm the most active with over 450 releases within the last year. And at that I've only gotten notifications about 4 re-released back into the wild. I've only seen 3 pre-labeled books in a year and a half.

@jengolbeck No links (affiliate or otherwise) make it hard to impulse buy your books on mobile... ;)

@dsifford My case will not likely be seen frequently in the first place, so I suspect that your fix should handle the largest number of cases. I don't think one would ever(?) face the issue with respect to journal articles and it's probably only books where it may crop up. In most modern book titles it's relatively infrequent that books will have the same title (usually for marketing purposes) but it may happen in cases like mine here, where some of the texts are older.

The only other potential issue I might see is if someone were doing an analysis of multiple editions of the same book by the same authors and they wanted to cite them all separately. In this case, possibly saving the ISBN field as the unique identifier for the book may be more useful, though it might not differentiate between slightly different "updates" (or corrected versions) of some text editions. (Off hand I know that Springer will often release moderate updates--usually with corrected typos--of a particular edition of a textbook without changing the edition number or the ISBN and some might want to potentially cite slightly different corrections of the same edition of a book.

There may also be edge cases in which one might want to separately cite a pre-print of a journal article (an early draft, on arXiv.org as an example) and then separately cite the final published article with potential updates. You'll then also likely run into this type of matching issue where you'll have the same title and authors but different publications with different dates.

If you want to get into super-edge-cases, there are some areas of scholarship in which one may also be studying time-varying versions of texts as in the Roman De La Rose Project [http://romandelarose.org/] and one may wish to cite the same textual source in which all the meta data is the same between them with the exception of the date of publication (or possibly the current owner/institutional holder when the text is very rare). I suspect in these cases a reasonable portion of the written analytical text will be devoted to the provenance of such texts to differentiate them in greater depth than would be done in a typical footnote.

I highly suspect that your proposed fix will handle the largest majority of cases as I can't think of an actual real-world example of any of the edge cases I mention in the preceding three paragraphs other than the Roman de la Rose project.

@natalieasis I think that a lot of researchers would be better off with additional "insider" industry data that isn't commonly or easily obtained. If you can get access to book manuscript submissions (for books) or screenplay submissions (for movies) from within the industry and cross-match those against what was in the zeitgeist for the current crop of 25-40 something aged book editors when they were reading in their formative teen years, you could better predict the next big thing. Watching manuscript purchases now will give you better lead times about what will be big a year to two years from now.

@natalieasis I don't know anyone applying that to books, which would be cool. Esp. if you could borrow data sets from Amazon or GoodReads.

@MitchWagner I noticed in your blog it seems like you're repeating your about, contacts, and books as both a menu and as "share" icons menu. I suspect you may have meant to create a social links menu (https://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/social-links-menu/) instead of repeating the other menu items. Then you created your social links using a separate widget.

This post https://codex.wordpress.org/Twenty_Fifteen/ covers a bit of what I'm talking about at the very bottom. In essence, you've got two places to which you can add menus and you're using them both to repeat the same set of links after which you're using a widget for your social media links. Why not use two separate menus (a main menu and a social menu) and ditch the widget?

@devonzuegel I came across your blog serendipitously and was impressed with some of the nifty tools you've implemented as well as the workflow you seem to have worked out vis-a-vis your website and miscellaneous tools. Thanks for sharing it all!

The idea of Instanote is intriguing to me, though I've been using MS OneNote instead of Evernote, which I've sampled several times. In addition to InstaPaper's API, I've previously used IFTTT.com to port over highlights. I've also been experimenting around with using http://hypothes.is (and their API) lately for notes/highlights as it seems to have a more scholarly bent among the highlight/note tools out there. You might find it interesting.

Given the way you use your website(s) for both identity and knowledge gathering (and owning your own data), I feel compelled to mention a group of hackers working in loose (but very open and very collaborative) concert at http://indieweb.org. You might find some of the tools and ideas over there interesting/useful.

Also given the terrific overlap in books we're reading/read, I might recommend physicist Sean Carroll's relatively new book The Big Picture (particularly part 4 on Complexity) which had some overlap on topics like Schelling's model of segregation as they relate to complexity and spontaneous organization which you may find interesting.