ncbi / ncbi/datasets

Author lists do not deduplicate authors with differing numbers of initials

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Description

When there are multiple author lists due to e.g. direct submission and publication being present on a Genbank record and the 2 publications contain the same author with differing numbers of initials, NCBI virus and datasets seem to not deduplicate the authors.

Note that Marti,M.A. and Marti,M. is the same individual appearing twice in NCBI virus (and datasets):

Image

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/virus/vssi/#/virus?SeqType_s=Nucleotide&ids=MG773272

The likely root cause is that the authors list is generated by making a set of authors from all references of the genbank record:

Image

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MG773272.1

In this case, the direct submission lists Marti,M. while the publication has Marti,M.A..

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Research direction

Reproduce the issue with GenBank record MG773272 and inspect how the author list is assembled from all references. Verify the differing forms such as Marti,M. and Marti,M.A. are treated as one author, and confirm the resulting NCBI Virus and datasets output contains no duplicate.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
databases
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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