Michael J. Rosen - Goodreads Author

[Petra X]

This author has no books and no friends so I would think the site has been set up by someone on GR with the author's permission and of course, can't be amended in any way.

Searching for Michael J. Rosen returns 99 results, most of them for Michael Rosen. Same person. Searching for Michael Rosen returns 135 results of which all are by Michael J. Rosen except for two, Handbook of Percutaneous Central Venous Catheterization (2nd) & Web Services Architecture which are by two other Michael Rosens.

There is a note on the Michael Rosen author sites that the name has been subject to disambiguation by spaces as there is more than one Michael Rosen.

My problem is that Michael J. Rosen is known as Michael Rosen, very few of his books have the J. initial. So anyone searching for a book or adding a book is likely to find Michael Rosen. However the books (and there are many editions of each title quite often) cannot be combined - 133 of them would have to have their authors changed to Michael J. Rosen in order to combine correctly. This doesn't make sense, at least not to me.

Sorry for having been so long-winded, but I don't want to go and mess up an author (one of my favourite authors too) with so many books so I thought I seek advice on what to do?

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

If I understand what you're saying, the Michael Rosen with a single space in the name (Michael_Rosen) is the same person as the GR author Michael J. Rosen? (excepting one or two erroneous books?)

Rather than change 133 books, the far simpler solution is to rename Michael_Rosen to Michael_J._Rosen and then find the few books which are not by him and put them back to Michael_Rosen (or to one of the other three authors by the same name which have already been separated if any of them are correct).

If that leaves no author with a single space, we'll rename the 4 space author back to 1 space.

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

I don't know if this has anything to do with what you're asking, Petra, but a few months ago I cleaned up Michael J. Rosen. Jessica had posted on here asking for help for him and gave a link to a list of his works. Here's the topic it showed up in:

This "author" needs help It's post #54. It's very possible I missed some or screwed up, but this might help you with what you're doing.

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

I thought that there had been a thread about him, but I couldn't find it in a search....I guess the search posts wasn't working properly last night.

Maybe Petra can confirm whether the two different authors are currently still conflated or are separated properly?

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

I haven't checked back in on him since mid-October, so there's probably some work to be done. I'm at work now and this computer gives me trouble when I start getting too involved with anything on here.

[Vitali]

I also searched for his name yesterday (the name sounded familiar), but I didn't find it. I see it now (thanks to JG), but it is still not possible to find it through 'search by post or topic'.

[Petra X]

Michael wrote: "If I understand what you're saying, the Michael Rosen with a single space in the name (Michael_Rosen) is the same person as the GR author Michael J. Rosen? (excepting one or two erroneous books?)

..."


Because Michael J. Rosen is a Goodreads author, I can't alter his name to Michael Rosen, which would make sense.

I don't know what work JG did but I do see that MR's books ought to be under either Michael J. Rosen or Michael Rosen and since most of his books are published under Michael Rosen that would seem to be the logical name. Since JG has been involved in this fairly confusing and very prolific author, I don't really want to do anything in case I screw something up.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

In general, even when an author's middle initial does not appear on their books, we use it for disambiguation purposes whenever possible. So even if this author were not a GR author, he should stay as Michael J. Rosen, to distinguish him from the various other Michael Rosens.

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

The covers for the ones I remember being for sure Michael J. Rosen's actually say Michael J. Rosen. Like it says in the link I posted above, there is a Michael Rosen children's author and a Michael J. Rosen children's author. Is that where the confusion is coming in? I'll try to check it tomorrow when I'm on my own computer.

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

Okay, I see what I did. Long story short--Petra, feel free to work on Michael^Rosen. I'm sure you know more about him than I do.

Explanation:
The big problem: Most of Michael Rosen's books come into our database as Michael J. Rosen's.
How I made the problem worse: When I was separating those out from the real Michael J. Rosen books, I only changed the name on the most popular edition, so all the other editions still had Michael J. Rosen's name on them. I have gone through every edition of all the Michael Rosens and Michael J. Rosens twice and fixed all that.

Michael J. Rosen is in good shape. Michael Rosen the children's book author could probably still use some help.

[Petra X]

When I checked before I wrote the original comment, 133 books on Goodreads were under the name of Michael Rosen and a smaller number 99, under Michael J. Rosen, so the majority of the books by this author are not coming in under the name Michael J. Rosen or are those ones you changed? I see that they have been worked on in the last few days by you. I am sure you know a lot more about the GR database than I do, so I will leave you to it.

[JG (Introverted Reader)]

Before I worked on Michael J. Rosen, apparently all the books by all the Michael Rosens were on the profile for Michael J. Rosen. I don't remember. But I based my comments on the database on the statements made by Michael J. Rosen

"All of the books by Michael Rosen (from the UK), who has no "J." in his publishing name, are listed here with that middle initial, thus conflating all his books with my own, published under the name "Michael J. Rosen."

and on his website: "Here is the entire Michael J. Rosen Bookshelf (that is, a list of books that I’ve actually written, edited, or illustrated, which does not include books by other folks named “Michael Rosen” often falsely attributed to me)."

You found the numbers that you found in December because I mostly fixed this in October. This is a problem and it sounds like they've been dealing with it for a long time. I think we'll be dealing with it for a long time, as long as new editions of their work keep coming in. I'll try to remember to keep an eye on Michael J. Rosen since I've got his list of works saved on my computer. It's always possible that I have or will screw something up though, so assistance and/or second opinions are always welcome.

[Petra X]

The only extra resources I am likely to have than you are book distributors stocklists which are mostly American and therefore not much good really for Rosen. But of course if I can help in any way, just ask.