Help:How to unmerge titles

This page is a help or manual page for the ISFDB database. It describes standards or methods for entering or maintaining data in the ISFDB database, or otherwise working with the database. Other help pages may be found via the category below. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. If, after exploring the Help system, you still have a question, please visit the Help desk and let us know. We probably know the answer, but we need your help to know what we left out of the help pages. If you are new to editing the ISFDB, please see Help:Getting Started. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

In the ISFDB, a title can have multiple publications. When an editor enters a new publication, it can get merged with existing titles if it's really just the same book in a new publication. See the help on merging titles and on recording variant titles for more information on how those merges occur.

However, sometimes you may discover that two publications are listed together under a title, but they really shouldn't be. Sometimes this is a simple mistake; the wrong title was merged. Occasionally it may be that a revised version of the book has been entered as a new publication under the original title, but eventually the author project team decides it should be a separate title. In these cases, you want to take the individual publication records and point them at separate title records again. There are two ways to deal with this. The first way is to delete the publication in question and then enter the deleted data as a new publication, which will create a new title record for it. Alternatively, you can unmerge and remerge the publications.

Deleting and re-adding publications

If you only need to move one or two publications out of a long list, and the publications are not collections/anthologies that have a lot of content, then it may be simpler to add the publication(s) under the correct title(s) (copy/pasting data from the original), and then to delete the original publication(s).

Unmerging and remerging publications

If you need to move many publications or if they contain a lot of content (as with collections and anthologies), or if there are verifications to preserve, then use the unmerge/remerge method that's described here.

To do this, display the title in question. For example: let's say there is a title that looks like this:

 Title: Darwin's Blade
 Author: Dan Simmons
 Year: 2000
 Publications:
   * Darwin's Blade (2000 , William Morrow, 0380973693, $25.00, 368pp, hc)
   * Darwin's Radio (Oct 2001 , HarperTorch, $7.50, tp)
   * Das Schlangenhaupt. (Mar 2002 , Goldmann, 3442451051, tp)
   * Bisturi de Darwin (Jul 2002 , Diagonal -Grupo 62, 8495808072, $60.90, tp)

Suppose that you wanted to unmerge these titles, because one of them (Darwin's Radio) is really a separate title, and was merged by mistake. When you display this title, there will be an "Unmerge this Title" link in the left navbar. Clicking this link will bring up a screen called "Title Unmerge Request" This has a list of the publications with a checkbox for each. Select the checkbox (or boxes) for the publication (or pubs) to unmerge from this title. Then click the "Submit Unmerge" button; clicking that button will submit the unmerge of the selected pubs for approval. Once approved, this would break up these publications and create a separate title for each. After the unmerge, if all 4 had been selected, the following titles would exist:

   * Darwin's Blade (2000)
   * Darwin's Radio (2001)
   * Das Schlangenhaupt. (2002)
   * Bisturi de Darwin (2002)

The three duplicates (everything but the "Darwin's Radio" title) would have to be remerged by hand.