Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Hi all,

Is it possible to provide aliases or alternative names for authors or even to merge multiple authors?

I've been noticing that quite a few authors that are known by many names (or misspelled) have multiple repeated book entries for each name, which makes it harder to combine editions.

One good example is the Portuguese author José Maria Eça de Queirós,which is also known as Eça de Queirós, Eca de Queiros, Eça de Queiroz, Jose Maria Eca de Queiros, etc.

Thanks,

fjeronimo

It is not possible at this point to have aliases, although it is a long-awaited to-do item. (You will sometimes hear people talk about the "AKA feature".)

However, misspelled authors can be merged. I did so with all the versions of the author you mentioned that I could find.

Thanks rivka. I've already merged a few other aliases for this author as well.

I can't seem to merge this author. Janna McMahan and McMahan, Janna. The second profile has one of the author's work which is already listed on the other. I tried to see if i could combine the two but couldn't, so if one of you can fix that and tell me what to do next time i would really appreciate it. Thank you!

I think it's probably because she's a GoodReads author. I had this same problem a while back. You can't edit the profile, but you can edit the books listed under the wrong name individually. (That is, bring up each book and correct the author's name.)

And when you're left with an author profile with no books on it, change the author name to Various and then merge it with the existing Various. This helps clean up empty/wrong author names from the database.

I didn't know about that - thanks for the tip.

Glad to help. = )

Just be sure that there aren't any quotes, fans, blogs, videos, links, or other things on the profile before you merge it!

Very useful stuff, thanks!

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

I found in a book that someone had listed both as authors but she's the same in both author pages. What do I do? I don't know how can I merge them.. Thanks

I edited the authors so they merged into one profile. You should be able to merge the any editions you find now.

Thanks :D