Add an author management system

[claell]

Is your suggestion for improvement related to a problem? Please describe.
When managing entries, they don't always use consistent author names. For a good citation style, this can be beneficial, though. In other applications like Citavi, not having consistent author names, can lead to unexpected behavior when citing. Not sure whether LaTeX has better ways to recognize the same author, but possibly the same problems will occur there.

Describe the solution you'd like
A system that lists authors and allows merging them (in case of duplicates)

Additional context
Might also need some more semantic understanding in case of merges from external sources that don't have consistent author names.

[ThiloteE]

Welcome back Claudius :-) Nice to see you again!

Have you tried Quality > Find Duplicates? You could select all your entries and use this feature or you could sort your entry table columns by author, then select a short sub-set of similar sounding authors and then use this feature or alternatively manually merge two entries via Quality > Merge entries.
Also, have you already tried the newest development version? There was a huge rework of the Entry Merge Dialogue done by @HoussemNasri, which works great. The new Entry Merge Dialogue looks and feels awesome to work with (There will be a new release soon).

[claell]

Thanks :) Took some absence from actively involving myself, but did not stop using JabRef.

The options you mention might work, but are not really designed to only merge the author names (not the entries themselves), right?

I have been following the development and also saw the new merge dialog, which I am keen to test (but will wait until it makes its way into the next official release).

[koppor]

This references following issues:

• Support of BibLaTeX name format: Handling of explicit nameparts #8760, Add support of BibLaTeX extended name format #4558 (to be able to store all parts of a name properly)
• Support for ORCID IDs: Add support for ORCID jabref-koppor#122
• New concept for the entry editor: New concept for the entry editor #6856

In short, JabRef should offer

• a list of known authors
• map authors of a BibEntry to known authors. If no mapping is found: do a AI-supported mapping (and let the user check whether the mapping is OK). Similar to Crowdin's translation approach - or MusicBrainz Picard's approach

More backgrond:

Authors might a) have the same name, but are different persons and b) authors may be written differently in BibTeX. Take "O. Kopp" vs. "Kopp, Oliver" as example.