The quality check plugin has some useful functions for authors (checks for reversed author sort and other things).
Also if your authors are sorted ln,fn it is easy to find discrepancies in the tag browser.
I have never cared much about publishers but I guess neatness is your concern.
I have only 3000 authors but 1800 series. I manually checked them a while ago and there were under 1000, but I have been updating metadata on books with no comments and I guess they crept back in
When manually checking them I found that a series could have 5 different but similiar names.
XXX, The XXX Mysteries, An XXX Mystery, XXX Mysteries, An XXX Mystery Story.
Oh well someday a plugin will come
Helen