Help:How to merge authors

'''Note that the ability to preform Author Merges is only available to ISFDB moderators at this time. If you want to merge two Author records, please post a request on ISFDB:Moderator noticeboard'''.

There are two related situations in which you might want to connect two independent author records.


 * 1) Suppose an author has some records entered incorrectly in the database: for example, some records for "S. P. Somtow" might be entered as "S. Somtow", but the latter is incorrect as the publications in question in fact listed the author as "S. P. Somtow". In this case, you could change each publication record, one by one, but it would be more convenient to simply tell the ISFDB to merge all these records under "S. P. Somtow".  This page tells you how to do this.
 * 2) Suppose you see a title record for a story by Edward P. Bradbury, and you happen to know that this is one of Michael Moorcock's pseudonyms. If the ISFDB does not show "Edward P. Bradbury" as being a pseudonym of Michael Moorcock, you should enter this information.  To do this, see the pseudonym help page.

To merge two authors together:


 * Click on Advanced Search in the navigation bar.
 * In the section labeled ISFDB Author Search form, enter common terms into the term1 field (in the S.P. Somtow case, just enter "Somtow") and press Submit. When merging a canonical name and a pseudonym, the search query may be more complicated ("Robin Hobb" OR "Megan Lindholm").
 * All of the authors that match the search strings will be displayed in a table. The first column contains a merge checkbox.
 * Select the checkboxes of exactly two authors to merge, and click on Merge Selected Records.
 * Any conflicts between the records will be shown on the next page highlighted in red. You need to pick which values you want to have retained.
 * There is an additional set of radio buttons at the bottom of the page which controls how the changes are applied. We'll use "target author" to mean the author whose data is not being modified; the "source author" is the one which will disappear after the merge.  Note that the authors may be referenced in title records and/or publication records.
 * If you choose to merge all records, the merge function will replace all references to the source author with references to the target author.
 * If you choose to only merge titles, the target author acquires copies of the source author's titles, but it will leave the publications in an inconsistent state.
 * If you merge publications but not titles, the publications are updated to point to the correct author id, but the name of the author on the publication record is not changed. In addition, no title record is created for the target author for the publication, and the title records for the source author are left in place, though the original publication record no longer points to the source author.