A list of disambiguated authors with same name?

[Emma]

I am cleaning non-famous Shirley Hughes' books out of famous Shirley Hughes' profile; those that are going elsewhere are by very low profile Shirleys. I think that some of the books I'm moving are by the same Shirleys; that is, I believe the Shirleys I'm moving out may belong to more than one of those books each - still working that out. When I want to assign one of the books to a Shirley that I've already disambiguated with extra spaces, is there a way to look at a list of them, so I can see which one has how many spaces? To find the low profile Shirley Hughes books by author is now nigh-on impossible without scrolling through pages and pages of famous-Hughes books. Is there some way of seeing an author disambiguation page so I can be clear about which Shirley gets which books?

[Koenraad]

You can try this:

Go to the profile page of one of the authors you separated out. On the bottom of your right side, you have a link called 'similar names'. Clicking this will give you this listing of names that resemble Shirley Hughes, including those with middle initials and middle names. On this list you'll find the number of spaces in the entire name for each author.

There are a couple of drawbacks though:
- 'Shirley Hughes', 'Shirley A. Hughes', 'Shirley B. Hughes' and 'Shirley Cassie Hughes' will all have 2 spaces.
- as far as I can see, the names are not listed in a specific order
- for each author, only one book is listed

When disambiguating, it is advisable to:
- put the following text in the biography section of each separate author (there it is visible to all users): "<i>Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.</i>"
- add a Librarian's Note to the profile mentioning the author's name with the number of spaces (represented by carets) and -if possible- a short note on the author (something like historian, medical doctor, philosopher...)
For an example you can look here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/edit....

Good hunting :)

[Emma]

Thanks Koenraad that's very helpful indeed! My Shirley Hughes is looking much nicer now.