Authors metadata table in database

[Almadl]

Hi all.
things are going good in my office: a lot of University of Bologna journals are asking us to move to OJS
Although this is a good thing, there much work to do: for example, I succesfully imported a list of 25 issues with the new OJS of this journal (http://journals.unibo.it/riviste/index. ... tica/index),
but as you can see here the Authors list contains a lot of authors written with capital letters (http://journals.unibo.it/riviste/index. ... ch/authors).

We have tried to find the right table, in the db, which contains all the metadata for Authors:
it could be fairly easy to run a script to correct automatically the case in Name and Last name fields, and this could save us a lot of time
(as you know authors double easily in OJS for mismatched metadata, so there will be a lot of manual polishing anyway...).

Although, we *did* not find that table, we don't know where those authors metadata are in the db.

Could you help us in this? Do you think this approach is feasible?

Thank you,

Andrea
AlmaDL

[asmecher]

Hi AlmaDL,

If you're using a recent version of OJS, the table you're looking for is "authors". Converting the names in the database is probably the easiest way, but beware of course of names that have more complicated capitalization, such as McSomething or O'Something.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[Almadl]

Hi, the Authors table is as follows

AUTHORS table
| author_id
| submission_id
| first_name
| middle_name
| last_name
| country
| email
| url
| primary_contact
| seq
| user_group_id

My issue is that I am looking for a relationship between Authors and Journals, because we have a multifarm installation: I need to know all the authors given a particular journal id, so that I can run a script on those authors and change the case, only in that journal.
Do you have an idea how I could do that?

Thank you very much for your help

Andrea

[JasonNugent]

Hi Andrea,

The authors table has a 'submission_id' column which is where the article id stored. You can do a query between authors and articles to get the authors for a particular article, or extend that SQL join to include the journals table and join on articles.journal_id and journals.journal_id. Doing that would give you the authors for a particular journal.

Regards,
Jason

[Almadl]

I forgot to say that I solved my issue, so thanks.

However, i would like to take the opportunity to discuss the general issue: authors metadata.
This must be addressed before (I didn't find anything relevant/up to date though), but managing authors metadata (especially from archived issues)
it is a real pain.
I work with 17 journals, and all the editorial teams don't use the whole online produre, but they only upload galleys for publication.
This means that everytime there are inconsistencies, and authors are often duplicated in the "Browse by author" list.
Is it planned to develop a sort of authority file/profile structure for authors?
Have you had other feedback on this particular topic?

One "patch" that could probably solve my main problem (duplication of authors)
could be to avoid using email as a "duplication parameter", which means to let same authors to have different emails but be the same author nonetheless.
Could it be feasible? Can I change this in my installation?

thank you for your work and availability (as usual).

Andrea