Upgrade StorageFind and merge similar authors
It's quite common to collect a bunch of papers with the same author, but if they come from different sources, then it's likely that they'll have different formats. For example, the same author might come across as:
Smith, J
Smith, J.
Smith, J. M.
Smith, John
Smith, John M.
etc.
All of these are valid, but having the different formats in zotero causes problems. For instance, they appear as different authors in a bibliography - annoying when they're the lead author and your bibliographic style presents multiple papers under one author name.
Would it be possible to have a duplicate-and-merge function for author names? Obviously the name format with the most information ("Smith, John Margaret") should be chosen, if it's available.
A similar function might be useful for Place, Publisher and Journal, and maybe a few other keys.
It would be preferable *not* to make this automatic, as there might be a "Smith, James M." out there that is also formatted as "Smith, J. M." or similar. In this case (fairly edgy), I'd just leave it up to the user to sort out manually.
Smith, J
Smith, J.
Smith, J. M.
Smith, John
Smith, John M.
etc.
All of these are valid, but having the different formats in zotero causes problems. For instance, they appear as different authors in a bibliography - annoying when they're the lead author and your bibliographic style presents multiple papers under one author name.
Would it be possible to have a duplicate-and-merge function for author names? Obviously the name format with the most information ("Smith, John Margaret") should be chosen, if it's available.
A similar function might be useful for Place, Publisher and Journal, and maybe a few other keys.
It would be preferable *not* to make this automatic, as there might be a "Smith, James M." out there that is also formatted as "Smith, J. M." or similar. In this case (fairly edgy), I'd just leave it up to the user to sort out manually.
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aurimasSee https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3913/single-author-with-two-different-name-spellings-short-vs-longhand for a lengthy discussion on this