The structure of author/editor names in publications

As many of you have noticed, BibSonomy stores author (and editor) names in the order "First Last", e.g., "Donald E. Knuth".
For most names that is no problem, but there are also names that get broken by this "feature". For example, for the name of our colleague Beate Navarro Bullock the first name is erronously detected to be "Beate Navarro" but it really is only "Beate".

Such names can be handled correctly by storing them in the "Last, First" order, e.g., "Navarro Bullock, Beate" as it is understood by BibTeX and many other publication management systems.

Therefore, we plan to change BibSonomy's person name handling to always store author and editor names in the "Last, First" format.

For you as our users this has the following consequences:

• Regardless of whether you enter your names in the "First Last" or "Last, First" format, they are always stored as "Last, First".
• The post publication form and the BibTeX import will support both "First, Last" and "Last, First".
  
• BibSonomy's BibTeX export will contain names in "Last, First" form.
• All input and output of the "REST-API" will be in "Last, First" form.

There are certainly other things that might change and problems that we might find - we will post them in this blog.

We plan to introduce this change in our after-summer relase in September. We would be very glad to hear your comments or problems you expect.

Feature of the Week: Author Search

One of the recently released new features is the author search. The author search is implemented based on the MySQL full text search feature of the myisam database engine. What we are doing is that we copy all the author information of a publication into a text field of a myisam table. Based on that we are able to request author names as words. This is a very fast and simple way to implement this feature.

The simplest way to search for an author is to try to search for the last name like Knuth. That's what we support right now and what we call a author page. What you get then is a list with all publications and a tag cloud of the author describing the topics of the author based on the tagged publication of our users. Every publication item contains now a link on the last name of every author linking its author page.

An additional restriction of the author search is possible by adding an additional author like  Janson or a tag restriction, see http://www.bibsonomy.org/author/Knuth/MMIX.

Currently we do not support a restriction by the first name of an author. An author name disambiguation is also not possible as we do not have a separate author table where we could store the same name for different author. We are planing to extend the current author search in those directions by a more advance version in the near future.

Have fun
  Andreas