I’ve (sadly) written many versions of a story as different projects. Is there a way to combine my projects so I can do searches across many projects?
Yes.
- Open the Project that you intend to be your new Master project.
- Then open a second project.
- In the second project, the safer route is to select Documents → Copy To Project, where you’d select your Master project, and finally click the Draft or Manuscript folder.
- Should you end up with documents in the Binder with the same name, but different content from one another, that’s fine. Scrivener can handle it, and you can rename it at a later stage.
- When done, close the second project and open a third.
- In the third project, select Documents → Copy To Project, where you’d select your Master project again, and finally the Draft or Manuscript folder.
- And so on.
Ensure your backups are in place for all your projects.
When you’re done with your Master project, close it to save.
If everything is hunky dory with you Master project on opening it again, send all your other projects to Trash.
Others might recommend dragging between projects. I don’t recommend that, especially if you are uncertain of what you need to do, and not everyone is adept at dropping documents in the right place.
Sorry for jumping in, but is this available on Windows?
I am a Windows user of Scrivener.
The only difference would be to send the no longer used projects to the Recycle Bin, instead of Trash–same process, different terminology–after following the prior recommended steps. That would be done by you through File Explorer. A Mac user would likely use Finder.
Where I refer to Master project, it’s meant to indicate some name that’s easily identifiable to you that this is the one true project you’ll be working on for a novel, or whatever your work entails.
No, I mean the Copy to Project feature 
Click on the Documents menu item. The nineth item down is Copy to Project.
Your need to have more than one project open, else Clicking on Copy to Project won’t respond, understandably so as it only works between open projects.
Clicking on Copy to Project lists the other project or projects that are open.
Clicking on one of the other projects, offers a whole lot of folders. Select Manuscript or Draft, because that’s where all your writing is done.
It will offer to copy to sub-documents/folders as well. Ignore that and simply click on Manuscript or Draft.
Another way to do this is use snapshots. you can have many different versions of a scene and save each version to compare.
So could have a scene where the bank robbery is successful and then write a new scene in the same file where the robbers are caught and keep both versions with titled snapshots.
Or create a folder in your research section and drag the whole project into it and have the files now in one project and tie related scenes together using document bookmarks. If click on the bookmark can set it to open up as a quick reference panel and compare to the current scene. Works great in multi monitor setups.
There is another method that I don’t see mentioned here, which is going to be the most convenient when we’re talking about merging entire projects, and that is to use the File ▸ Import ▸ Scrivener Project... menu command. You would use that from the “master project”, and select the (closed) project you want to fully import from the file dialogue that is presented.
Otherwise, I would recommend taking a look at §6.3.4, Moving and Copying Things Around, in the user manual PDF, and more specifically the subsection within that, Copying Files and Folders Between Projects. This will go over what copies, what doesn’t and what to prepare for—in particular of interest to those that use a lot of metadata.
Lastly there are potentially things you may want to copy that aren’t in the binder. While the section in the manual is about something else, the most concise list of things you may want to transfer is in §5.4.2, Converting a Project to a Different Template. This will cover copying compile settings, styles and so forth. In some cases you may want to do these things first. For example if text is styled in one project, and there are matching style names in the target project, the styles will remain assigned. But if you haven’t set up the styles yet in the target project, just the formatting will copy.
That holds true for metadata as well. You want to set up matching custom metadata first. Refer to Appendix C.1, Copying Settings Between Projects, for the details on how to do that. Note that you do not need to copy all of the metadata values, those will be created if necessary. For example if one of your books uses Labels for various topics, those topical labels will be created and remain assigned. But if for example you have a custom metadata field called “Event Date” in the original project, and not in the target project, it won’t be copied. If you copy the field over first though, then the data will transfer.
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Strangely enough, of all the gymnastics I’ve done with my six Scrivener Projects, I’ve only ever used Import once, to pull in a complete 110k project from Word, using import and split.