Let's say I have an author John Smith. On three papers, his name appears in three different formats: John Smith, Smith, John, and Smith, J.. Even though these all appear the same on the Biblio page (Smith, J), if I filter by any one of them I will not see the other papers. This is very confusing for end-users, and something of a nightmare for maintainers, because we have to pick a format (i.e. "Last Name, First Name") and make sure all authors are in that format, regardless of how they appear on the actual paper.

Biblio is already smart enough to parse the name into first and last names and initials, and to output "Last Name, First Initial", so it seems that it would be possible to search on each of these fields rather than on, or in addition to, the full name string.

Comments

rjerome’s picture

rjerome commented

This is an age old problem... Do you treat each as a distinct person or are they all the same person. There are currently two ways to filter by author: by name or by authorID. The links on the author names in a biblio listing filter by authorID (biblio/author/5), but if you wanted ALL the "Smith's" you could put biblio/author/smith.

I have been working on a fix for this very issue, it's called "author merging". In the situation you describe above, there will be three entries in the contributor database, one for each version of John Smith each with it's own author ID value, since when they are imported, there is no way to determine if they are actually the same person.

In the upcoming release of biblio, the admin will have an interface which will pinpoint similar author names (as you illustrate) and allow you to decide that these are in fact all the same person and let you "merge" them so there is only one entry for John Smith in the contributor database and thus all the publications for that author will be displayed when you click on their name.

I hope this answers your question.

danepowell’s picture

danepowell commented

That sounds great, I definitely look forward to seeing this interface in action! Thank you.

danepowell’s picture

danepowell commented
Status: Active » Fixed

With the introduction of author merging I'm considering this fixed. Thanks again!

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.