Inconsistent author name format (N. Surname; Name Surname etc)

z8080

Hello,

I have several papers by the same author, but his name is not consistently spellt across his papers, probably due to variations in how the meta PDF information (which I used for all papers) are filled in.

So for example the name of one author may appear as Name Surname in paper, then as N. Surname in another paper, N. I. Surname in another one etc, and this makes it very hard to find all papers by this author.

Can a setting not be made regarding a "policy" to always include the complete surname, or always include just the initial? If this style were consistent throughout the whole Zotero collection, it would be much easier to use!

Many thanks for any help :)

adamsmith

Zotero has to work with the data it gets - which is ideally as complete as possible, i.e. full surname and initial or at least full surname and middle name.
Not all databases provide that data and Zotero can't guess, so you'll have to complete by hand. In the medium run that will become easier as batch editing will be added as a feature.

z8080

I see.. Would you suggest waiting until batch editing is implemented in the next version, or, if that is likely to take a while, just start editing author names manually to make them consistent throughout my collection?

I am actually not sure that batch editing would help, since my problem is not missing information but different "formats" for that information, e.g. surnames written either with or without a hyphen. These all seem things that could easily be repaired automatically..

adamsmith

I wouldn't wait for batch editing - I don't think that's going to happen very soon.

Where exactly do you see those different surname spellings? Styles can already initialize everything, but then you will run into this issue:
http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation

Anything else I don't see how it could be done easily automatically. You'll need to describe in more detail what you mean.

z8080

The problem I'm having is exactly as described in the link you provided, so I guess the solution is either to do it by hand or make that style change. Thanks very much for your help!