If you're going to use this sort of pattern a lot, you could create a mixin like the following, though, it isn't doing anything fundementally different than your original code. It just makes it more developer friendly.
_.mixin({
'findByValues': function(collection, property, values) {
return _.filter(collection, function(item) {
return _.contains(values, item[property]);
});
}
});
Then you can use it like this.
var collections = [
{id: 1, name: 'xyz'},
{id: 2, name: 'ds'},
{id: 3, name: 'rtrt'},
{id: 4, name: 'nhf'},
{id: 5, name: 'qwe'}
];
var filtered = _.findByValues(collections, "id", [1,3,4]);
Update - This above answer is old and clunky. Please use the answer from Adam Boduch for a much more elegant solution.
_(collections)
.keyBy('id') // or .indexBy() if using lodash 3.x
.at(ids)
.value();