Merge similar authors

Is there a way to find and merge similar authors (and journals, etc)?

It would be really nice to have all of the papers with

Lastname, Firstname M
Lastname, Firstname M.
Lastname, Firstname Middle
Lastname, F M
Lastname, F. M.
Lastname, F
Lastname, F.

be grouped together and merged (ideally allowing me to pick which of the options I want to keep).
  • This seems like an idea for a useful plug-in. The current Zotero UI seems to only allow easy access to the first author. Even then full author names are readily available only after creating a bibliography.

    There are likely to be authors with common last names and identical first and middle initials but with different full names. With a large library it could be difficult to make decisions about merging. For my own (non-Zotero) online database I'm working on a utility that identifies shared co-authors and proximity of publication dates, assigns probabilities for likely matches, and displays candidates for manual merging. This would take place on the administrative- (not the public-) side of the database controls. The delay to implementation rests with decisions about probabilities assigned to the number of common co-authors (and the fullness of their names), proximity of publication dates, etc. Most Zotero users likely have authors who arise from only one or two professional disciplines thus authors with similar names might be uncommon. In my case, the SafetyLit database (700+ thousand publications and over 5 million author names) draws from more than 35 distinct disciplines. Thus, different authors with identical names are common. Using ORCID, VIAF, and other authority systems we gather biographical data (birth and death years) when possible and add that to the author table. This doesn't help much because the biographical info is missing for the majority of authors. Is the distinction between Fredrick John Smith the anthropologist and Fredrick John Smith the civil engineer important? I'd like to think so but I have serious OCD issues. Is it essential for bibliographic name disambiguation? I don't know.

    I'd love to have this Zotero plug-in because I'd love to know how well this would succeed across thousands of different Zotero libraries.
  • I'd also love to have this plug-in. There's something similar for Papers, for example, though I think you have to do it manually.

    Linking authors with ORCID would be amazing if possible, but even just matching on name would be a nice improvement. I'd like to keep the full name in Zotero and then let the reference software (ie, biblatex) decide how to handle initials, punctuation, etc
  • ORCID won't be of much help. I know many individuals who have multiple ORCID identifiers.
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