lbsMergeAuthors: Merge given authors

Description

Merges given sets of authors. For each group, the function maps all the related documents to a distinguished parent author (the first in a list) and removes the other, unused from then on, records (children).

Usage

lbsMergeAuthors(conn, idAuthors)

Arguments

conn

a connection object as produced by lbsConnect.

idAuthors

list of numeric vectors, each consisting of at least 2 authors' identifiers (see IdAuthor in the table Biblio_Authors); every first element of a vector becomes a parent to which other records are merged.

Value

TRUE on success.

Details

This function is useful when one author is represented by many records in a Local Bibliometric Storage (a typical situation in case of data gathered from on-line bibliographic databases), e.g. prof. John Thomas Smith appears as 'Smith J.' and 'Smith J.T.'. Some merge procedures are often absolutely necessary if we would like to assess the impact of authors reliably.

Note that you may use lbsFindDuplicateAuthors to generate input to this function. It will try to suggest which records should be merged (see Examples below).

For safety reasons, an SQL transaction opened at the beginning of the removal process is not committed (closed) automatically. You should do it on your own (or rollback it), see Examples below.

Examples

Run this code

# NOT RUN {
conn <- lbsConnect("Bibliometrics.db");
## ...
listauth <- lbsFindDuplicateAuthors(conn,
   ignoreWords=c("van", "von", "der", "no", "author", "name", "available"),
   minWordLength=4,
   orderResultsBy=c("citations"),
   aggressiveness=1);
lbsMergeAuthors(conn, listauth);
dbCommit(conn);
## ...
# }

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