Help:How to merge authors
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| 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.
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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 independent author records.
- 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". In this case, you could change each publication record, one by one, but 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.
- 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 being a pseudonym of Michael Moorcock, you should enter this information. To do this, see the pseudonym help page.
To merge two authors together:
- Click on Advanced Search in the navigation bar.
- In the section labeled ISFDB Author Search form, enter common terms into the term1 field (in the S.P. Somtow case, just enter "Somtow") and press Submit. When merging a canonical name and a pseudonym, the search query may be more complicated ("Robin Hobb" OR "Megan Lindholm").
- All of the authors that match the search strings will be displayed in a table. The first column contains a merge checkbox.
- Select the checkboxes of exactly two authors to merge, and click on Merge Selected Records.
- Any conflicts between the records will be shown on the next page highlighted in red. You need to pick which values you want to have retained.