Help:How to merge authors

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Note that the ability to preform Author Merges is only available to ISFDB moderators at this time. If you want to merge two Author records, please post a request on ISFDB:Moderator noticeboard.

There are two related situations in which you might want to connect two separate author records.

1. Suppose an author has some records entered incorrectly in the database. For example, some records for "S. P. Somtow" might be entered as "S. Somtow", but the latter is incorrect as the publications in question in fact listed the author as "S. P. Somtow". One way to fix this problem would be to change each publication record manually. However, it would be more convenient to simply tell the ISFDB to merge all these records under "S. P. Somtow". This page tells you how to do this.
2. Suppose you see a title record for a story by Edward P. Bradbury, and you happen to know that this is one of Michael Moorcock's pseudonyms. If the ISFDB does not show "Edward P. Bradbury" as an alternate name of Michael Moorcock, you should enter this information. To do this, see the Help:Screen:MakeAlternateName.

To merge two authors:

• Click on Advanced Search in the navigation bar on the left.
• In the section labeled "Author Search", select "Canonical Name" in the drop-down box on the left. Select "contains" in the second drop-down box. Enter a value that matches both names that you want to merge, e.g. "Somtow", in the blank field, then press the "Submit Query" button. When merging authors whose names do not have an obvious shared element, you may need to use more complex selection logic.
• All of the authors that match the entered search criteria will be displayed in a table. The first column contains a merge checkbox.
• Select the checkboxes of exactly two authors to merge and click "Merge Selected Records".
• Any conflicts between the records will be shown on the next page highlighted in red. You will need to pick which values you want to have retained.