Feature Idea: Author Management

[ch-sander]

This may be a scope creep for this plugin!

I miss an author management in Zotero where you can merge authors (instead of editing items), add metadata for authors (e.g. ORCID, Wikidata), explore items per author, export.

Maybe this could work similar to plugins by @windingwind

[ch-sander]

My idea is to create a dedicated view in which all unique creators (regardless of the role) of a library are listed, along with the items they are associated with. Here, authors could be renamed, merged, deleted through which relevant fields in the corresponding items are updated upon confirmation. The underlying SQLITE file would remain unchanged in structure, and Zotero’s API would continue to function as usual, maintaining literal-based fields. While all authors and their links to items could be queried dynamically, additional metadata on individual authors could be stored in an external file, associating unique author names to a dictionary. Ideally, the structure of this metadata dictionary—i.e. the keys—should be customizable.

[ch-sander]

Of course, this approach does not eliminate the naïve assumption that authors with the same name represent the same individual. However, implementing true canonicalization of authors would require a fundamental change to Zotero’s underlying data model to support named entities...