Talk:Authors By Debut Date

What is meant by "debut date"?
Looking at the first three authors of 1930, I know each of them published work before that year. So I'm not sure how this list is derived. Please explain. Thanks. Mhhutchins 18:46, 30 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Well spotted - I checked the original results then tried to cut them down to what James Nicoll desired - which was only those who debuted in the 1930s to 2000s. That second step tripped me up, and removed all the earlier publications from consideration rather than checking that the earliest was in range. He also wants female authors only, which is not something we can currently do, although maybe Darrah Chavey would push for such support as well. I'm abandoning such for tonight, I'm obviously too tired to work on it, and there have been enough warnings about "page size" that I probably need to take Wiki Limits into consideration too. BLongley 19:09, 30 June 2011 (UTC)


 * OK, I tried again. I set an arbitrary limit of half-a-dozen titles before an author was considered notable enough for inclusion. BLongley 14:45, 1 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Looks good. I'd even raise it to a dozen or more titles. There's too many obscure names. Mhhutchins 21:41, 1 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll see how used it is before changing it. The new page has already been spotted on Livejournal (the poster didn't realise that's where the request came from). And there's a load of "Gender Bias" discussions going on in the Blogosphere at present, I suspect we'll get some requests to break it down by gender, which obviously we can't do at present. (And is something I'm even less equipped to deal with than the recent language improvements.) BLongley 22:05, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Criteria Explained
The original request was "Is there some way to use the isfdb to get lists of authors by the decade in which they debuted?". Well, obviously there is, but not easily with the online tools, and it's not necessarily easy even if you're working with the downloaded data. So I asked for a bit more clarification about what "debuted" meant and I'd try to help. The full criteria actually turned out to be female authors for the 1930s through 2000s, just paid fiction, short and long; no non-fiction, no poems. We can't do a gender split, we don't record that: and we can't identify "paid or unpaid" either. But I could do the decade splits (after Mike Hutchins pointed out my first error), so that's what this page represents. Well, I also added the minimum title limits to reduce it to 5000 authors rather than 40000. BLongley 23:44, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

If anyone is interested in WHY this was desired, this might be a good starting point. And if anyone wants to expand the query for earlier decades or more obscure authors, here's the SQL:

select MIN(date_format(t.title_copyright,'%Y')) debut, a.author_canonical, count(*) NumPubs from titles t, canonical_author ca, authors a where t.title_ttype IN ('NOVEL','COLLECTION','SHORTFICTION') and ca.title_id = t.title_id and ca.author_id = a.author_id and t.title_parent = 0 group by ca.author_id HAVING debut >= '1930' and debut < '2011' and NumPubs > 5 ORDER BY 1,2

Please DO let me know if this contains errors. Or if you find it useful at all - sometimes I just like positive feedback. BLongley 23:44, 1 July 2011 (UTC)