Help:How to enter an author into the database

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.

When you add a publication (that is, create a new publication record using one of the "New Novel", "New Collection", etc. choices from the main ISFDB menu), several other things get added or linked automatically: a Title record, one or more Author records (these for both the author(s) and any artist(s)), and a Publisher are the primary ones. These are then used to construct the bibliography on the fly.

If those records do not already exist, they are created, and you can then find and edit them once the submission of the publication has been accepted by a moderator. If they do already exist, the new publication is linked to the proper Author and Publisher records

If a particular title already exists, you can either add more publications to it (you'll see "Add Publication to this Title" when looking at the title), or you can "Merge" the title created when you added your new publication with the existing one. The easiest way to do this is probably to use "Check for Duplicate Titles" when looking at the author's bibliography, but see Help: How to merge titles for a full description.

In short, there is no need to, and no way to, simply "add an author", authors are added (and deleted) automatically when their publications are added (or deleted).

To edit the author record once it has been created (for example to add a birth date or a link to a wikipedia article or a web site), go to the author display page. (This can be done by clicking the links on the author;'s name from any title or publication record of any of his or her works, or by typing the author's name into the search box in the upper left of each ISFDB screen, just below the ISFDB folder logo, being sure the search type is set to "name" and clicking "Go".) From the author display page, click "Edit Author Data" in the "Editing tools" section of the navbar to the left of the screen. This will open the "Author Editor" screen. For help with this screen, see Help:Screen:AuthorData.