Linking profile to multiple authors using multiselect

I discovered an option to "merge" authors that I did not know existed. From /biblio/authors you can do an "edit" on one author and merge it with another. Cool beans! A multiselect would avoid this extra step, but i am very happy to have a solution.

I'm not sure where you are proposing to add this multiselect.

FYI, Merging and linking are similar but different in that linking maintains all the various formations of an author name whereas merging keeps only a single instance of the author name. The thought being if someone changes their name (marriage, or other reasons) you could like the names so a search on one would yield entries for both. Merging is used for situations like you have where the same author name is expressed in many different ways and you want to rationalize the forms down to one.

Ah, I see.

Actually, by linking, I was referring to editing the biblio settings->publications under one's profile where you have
Link My Profile with this Author from the Biblio database: with a single select author list. I wanted to link a profile to multiple author names here as I was at that time unaware of the merge feature.

Sorry to bother you with this. I thought that I had marked issue as closed when I discovered that merge solved my problem.

Thanks for clarifying the difference between link and merge.

-- Kari

Hi,
I think what merging does is actually lets the database know that the 2 authors are basically one. But I do not think that while listing publications it displays all the publications from the two (supposedly different authors) into one on the profile page. It still lists only the publication from the name of the author you associate to in the account set up.

So even I think that being able to select more than one author is really a required feature.

Please let me know if I am missing something here.

Thanks
rpandey

Merging authors is a destructive process, it actually removes the selected authors from the database. Typically you would use this if you have the same author name entered in a number of different formats, but you know they all refer to the same person. Say I imported a bunch of publications and some had J. Smith, some had John Smith and some had John J. Smith. If I know all these authors refer to the same person, I would pick the one with the most detail (John J. Smith) and merge the other two (J. Smith and John Smith) with it. Now I will only have one Smith listed in the author database instead of three and all publications which were related to the (previous) three Smiths are now related to the single remaining Smith.

Linking is a non-destructive process, and is typically used if someone changes their name (perhaps due to marriage) and you want searches for either name to return results for BOTH names.

I suspect you want to merge and then link the Drupal user profile with the one remaining author name.

I would love to have multiselect in the "Link My Profile with this Author from the Biblio database: "

I have a number of users who have published under their maiden name, married name, and re-married name. At the moment, their profile can only be linked to publications under one of their names.

Have you tried the Author "Link" feature for this? If you go the the Author edit page and link various "maiden name, married name, and re-married name" together, then on the profile page just pick the current or one of the previous names, they should all be listed.