Hi,

I have the problem that author names differ between literature databases or between different publications within one database. This applies even to names which belong to the same author (e.g. John Miller, J. Miller, John Arthur Miller, J. A. Miller etc). If one cites the publications in text, many reference styles deal with the names as different authors. This leads to messy citations such as: ... causes a great burden of disease (John Arthur Miller, 2009), where ... (Miller, 2009) or even (J. Miller, 2009) would be enough.

My request is to develop a tool which unifies author first names within the whole zotero database/specific folders/entries, keeping only the first letter of the first name and saving the full/original author names list in another database entry.

This would save me a lot of time manually editing my database file.

What do you think out there?

/Will