Managing Authors with prefixes and Suffixes

[WalterWalter]

Hello,
calibre handles authors with prefixes and suffixes quite well . But I still run into the following problem:
Roger Penrose in my Library has entries as:
Prof. Roger Penrose
Prof. Dr. Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose PhD
Prof. Roger Penrose PhD
Roger Penrose DPhil
and also just Roger Penrose.
Calibre treats them as different authors ( some with the same author sort). So if I click on a book by Prof. Roger Penrose and search for books with the same author I will not get books by Roger Penrose PhD. Is there a way to tell Calibre that all these authors are really the same?
A similar problem exist for authors writing under different pen names.
My workaround at the moment is to add as a first author Roger Penrose and have the other name as the second author.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

[ownedbycats]

For all the Roger Penroses, my suggestion is to merge them all into one author. Find Duplicates plugin has a "Find Metadata Variations" option that's helpful.

Unfortunately, pen names is a tricker problem.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by WalterWalter

Hello,
calibre handles authors with prefixes and suffixes quite well . But I still run into the following problem:
Roger Penrose in my Library has entries as:
Prof. Roger Penrose
Prof. Dr. Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose PhD
Prof. Roger Penrose PhD
Roger Penrose DPhil
and also just Roger Penrose.
Calibre treats them as different authors ( some with the same author sort). So if I click on a book by Prof. Roger Penrose and search for books with the same author I will not get books by Roger Penrose PhD. Is there a way to tell Calibre that all these authors are really the same?
A similar problem exist for authors writing under different pen names.
My workaround at the moment is to add as a first author Roger Penrose and have the other name as the second author.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Have a look at the Preferences->Searching->Group Searches and Similar books tabs.

BR

[WalterWalter]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

For all the Roger Penroses, my suggestion is to merge them all into one author. Find Duplicates plugin has a "Find Metadata Variations" option that's helpful.

Unfortunately, pen names is a tricker problem.

Thanks for the reply. This is a possibility, but I do want to loose the information, of how the auther is named on the cover of a book. If the author on the cover is Roger Penrose PhD I want to keep that information, especially if Roger Penrose is the Editor and not the Author, i. e. Roger Penrose Ed.

[WalterWalter]

Originally Posted by WalterWalter

Thanks for the reply. This is a possibility, but I do want to loose the information, of how the auther is named on the cover of a book. If the author on the cover is Roger Penrose PhD I want to keep that information, especially if Roger Penrose is the Editor and not the Author, i. e. Roger Penrose Ed.

Sorry, i meant to write "but I do NOT want to loose the information"

[WalterWalter]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Have a look at the Preferences->Searching->Group Searches and Similar books tabs.

BR

Thank you for the hint. I tried it. Setting similar books to Author sort works fine for single authors, it will find all all "Roger Penrose" in author_sort no matter what the name of the author. But it totally breaks down for more than one author. So a book with the author "RogerPenrose & Albert Einstein" will not be found when doing a similar search on author_sort even with the match any option. Morove, a similar search on a book with authors "RogerPenrose & Albert Einstein" will not find a book with the authors "Albert Einstein & RogerPenrose".

A grouped search will not help, since only want to search the column author_sort. I could maybe add custom columns for author1_sort, author2_sort and so on and than search over all these cusom columns, but that seems overly complex.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by WalterWalter

Thank you for the hint. I tried it. Setting similar books to Author sort works fine for single authors, it will find all all "Roger Penrose" in author_sort no matter what the name of the author. But it totally breaks down for more than one author. So a book with the author "RogerPenrose & Albert Einstein" will not be found when doing a similar search on author_sort even with the match any option. Morove, a similar search on a book with authors "RogerPenrose & Albert Einstein" will not find a book with the authors "Albert Einstein & RogerPenrose".

A grouped search will not help, since only want to search the column author_sort. I could maybe add custom columns for author1_sort, author2_sort and so on and than search over all these cusom columns, but that seems overly complex.

Like you, I prefer the Cover name in Author (except I will normalize (w/)Initials when both are used), so Christopher Nuttall always has his middle initial; G.)

Been a while since I set this up.
I have a custom column #psudo4 (first image)
Originally this was just for pen names, but like all things it filled others (later)

But this is where I put the Real name if the cover has a pen name


As for searching you just need to set Preferences Similar and Grouped searches up. FWIW Penned_As now appears in the Tag browser, so you could drive your search from there

OK it is later Other uses:
I limit my {Author} up to 3 names , Part of the reason was File based devices could not deal with the huge path (or it got munged up so weird)

Collections: {Author} gets the Primary or EDITORS, all the others get into #pseudo4 .

FWIW I do something similar with series, but I use <various> IN {SERIES} if there is more than 2 (I am of the school, to avoid many extra columns if only used rarely)

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by WalterWalter

Sorry, i meant to write "but I do NOT want to loose the information"

Right now I'm tackling a similar problem when updating author notes via Goodreads (GR notes plugin). I can't get the Bio if author is suffixed by MD, Phd etc.

So, for instance, I had 'Vivek H Murthy, MD'. Bio wouldn't get fetched. Then I removed the MD bit and it did download the author Bio.

I thought of creating a column just for the academic degrees by doing a search and replace targeting a #degree column for any MD, PhD preceded by a comma, but now I see that some authors don't have the separating comma...sigh. So I'm still thinking what approach I'm going to take, maybe use regex to match whole words such as MD, Phd, MPH regardless of being preceded by commas.

[Comfy.n]

And then there are also titles where multiple authors have different degrees, I give up.

edit: Well, I've set two action chains: one populates the #suffixes column with PhD, another clears the PhD string from author field. Looking good so far. Need to do the same for MD, MPH etc.

There are also cases where author has various degrees. grr...

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Comfy.n

And then there are also titles where multiple authors have different degrees, I give up.

edit: Well, I've set two action chains: one populates the #suffixes column with PhD, another clears the PhD string from author field. Looking good so far. Need to do the same for MD, MPH etc.

There are also cases where author has various degrees. grr...

Maybe @chaley could provide a template to remove the prefixes and suffixes that are defined in the Author sort name algorithm Tweak… he could call it 'naked_author'.

And an option to use it in these searches:



Then we'd get this: rather than:

I don't know if it would work for GR Notes.

BR

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Maybe @chaley could provide a template to remove the prefixes and suffixes that are defined in the Author sort name algorithm Tweak… he could call it 'naked_author'.

Sounds like a good idea! Would spare some busy work for sure.

I'm done now with most titles using the chains I mentioned and the Suffixes column looks fine:

[chaley]

Here it is. I used calibre's author_sort code as a basis. I have no idea if the template is actually useful.

Here is the exported stored template.

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by chaley

Here it is. I used calibre's author_sort code as a basis. I have no idea if the template is actually useful.

Here is the exported stored template.

Nice, thanks! The stored templates import/export makes it so much easier than copying/pasting code.

Later I'll look more into it but it works fine for 'normalised'/consistent suffixes:

[BetterRed]

Slightly off topic: I've often wondered why Author prefixes (e.g. titles: Professor, Sir, Baron, Duchess, etc) are stripped from the Tag browser entries, but not the suffixes (e.g. MSc, PhD, FRS etc).

Senior academics often have a half-dozen or more qualifications, e.g. Professor Salim S Abdool Karim could have any combination of the following (including none) in his published works and citations: MBChB, MMed, MS(Epi), FFPHM, FFPath (Virol), DipData, PhD, DSc(hc), FRS.

BR