Author in title field

[Paul]

I have recently noticed an issue with a number of books where a full stop, space and then the author's name are being appended to the title field (and sort title field). For example http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12... (which I have temporarily left uncorrected as an example).

The source of this problem seems to be data from Ingram either used to create the record or incorrectly amending the data in a record from elsewhere, as it did in the example cited:

ingram updated the book Red Mist. Patricia Cornwell by Patricia Cornwell
title: 'Red Mist' to 'Red Mist. Patricia Cornwell'
May 16, 2012 06:26pm (#34449022)

The date on this change log clearly demonstrates that this is an ongoing issue (not just related to the mass import a few months ago) and it would be good if it could be investigated to avoid the same happening with future imports.

Paul

[Vicky]

I suspect this isn't an error that can be fixed by the importer. If Ingram's data lists the title as "Red Mist. Patricia Cornwell" that's what the GR importer will bring in.

Unless the importer says to ignore everything after a period (which is not always wise), there's no way to filter it out.

From looking at the log it doesn't look like Goodreads remembers who entered the title initially - but in most cases Goodreads will know and if it was entered (or fixed) by a user it should not be overwritten.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Actually, I checked with Chase, and he tells me that we do filter out author names after periods (because this is a known issue with Ingram data) -- but only when they match. Ingram thinks the author is this case is "Patricia Daniels Cornwell", so there was no match, and the filter didn't strip it out. As Vicky said, stripping out all data after a period from book titles would be quite problematic, so we're not about to do that.

Chase also said:

I would suggest that Librarians just fix these errors as they see them. If there are many thousands, we could write/run a script that tries to be a little smarter about it -- so, let us know if you start seeing this a lot.