Support request: authors with same names getting merged into one (bibutils 5.6)

[Jason Annadani]

Hi,
We've been using bibutils 5.6 to provide citation/reference downloads on our site for a year - we formulate mods xml and use xml2bib/ris/enw to get the target format.

We have an issue where different authors who have the same first and last names show up as only one author (see mods and ris examples below). This occurs whether we send a distinguishing <affiliation> sub-element or not.

Would you be able to look at this bug, please?
Thanks
Jason

MODS: Three authors, the first and third are both named "Faisal Rehman"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods>
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Estimation of dielectric permittivity, water content, and porosity for environmental engineering and hydrogeological studies using ground penetrating radar, a short review</title>
    </titleInfo>

    <name type="personal">
       <namePart type="given">Faisal</namePart>       
       <namePart type="family">Rehman</namePart>
       <role>
           <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
       </role>
    </name>
        <name type="personal">
       <namePart type="given">Helmy</namePart>
              <namePart type="given">Salah</namePart>
              <namePart type="given">Osman</namePart>

       <namePart type="family">Abouelnaga</namePart>
       <role>
           <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
       </role>
    </name>
        <name type="personal">
       <namePart type="given">Faisal</namePart>

       <namePart type="family">Rehman</namePart>
       <role>
           <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
       </role>
    </name>

    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2016</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <abstract>Ground penetrating radar is a noninvasive geophysical technique that can be used to infer subsurface geological, geotechnical, and petrophysical attributes. For water contamination studies, ultimate target, i.e., contaminant flow, is demarcated with the help of dielectric permittivity, water content, and porosity. The dielectric permittivity facilitates to evaluate water content; whereas the dielectric permittivity can be estimated by using the interval velocity, and porosity can be estimated by using the information of water content and dielectric permittivity. All these parameters are interlinked. This paper describes different empirical and mixing relationships to calculate approximately these parameters and their utilization in predicting the hydrogeological model of the area.</abstract>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <genre>journal article</genre>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Arabian Journal of Geosciences</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <originInfo>
            <issuance>continuing</issuance>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">periodical</genre>
        <genre>academic journal</genre>
        <identifier type="issn">1866-7538</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <identifier type="doi">10.1007/s12517-016-2328-7</identifier>
    <part>
        <date>2016</date>
        <detail type="volume"><number>9</number></detail>
        <detail type="issue"><number>4</number></detail>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>1</start>
            <end>7</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
    <location>
        <url>http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12517-016-2328-7</url>
    </location>
</mods>

</modsCollection>

xml2ris returns only two authors:

TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rehman, Faisal
AU  - Abouelnaga, Helmy Salah Osman
PY  - 2016
DA  - 2016//
TI  - Estimation of dielectric permittivity, water content, and porosity for environmental engineering and hydrogeological studies using ground penetrating radar, a short review
JO  - Arabian Journal of Geosciences
SP  - 1
EP  - 7
VL  - 9
IS  - 4
AB  - Ground penetrating radar is a noninvasive geophysical technique that can be used to infer subsurface geological, geotechnical, and petrophysical attributes. For water contamination studies, ultimate target, i.e., contaminant flow, is demarcated with the help of dielectric permittivity, water content, and porosity. The dielectric permittivity facilitates to evaluate water content; whereas the dielectric permittivity can be estimated by using the interval velocity, and porosity can be estimated by using the information of water content and dielectric permittivity. All these parameters are interlinked. This paper describes different empirical and mixing relationships to calculate approximately these parameters and their utilization in predicting the hydrogeological model of the area.
SN  - 1866-7538
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12517-016-2328-7
DO  - 10.1007/s12517-016-2328-7
ID  - Rehman2016
ER  - 

same result occurs when we pass MODS (with affiliations specified) e.g. :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods>
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Estimation of dielectric permittivity, water content, and porosity for environmental engineering and hydrogeological studies using ground penetrating radar, a short review</title>
    </titleInfo>

    <name type="personal">
       <namePart type="given">Faisal</namePart>       
       <namePart type="family">Rehman</namePart>
       <affiliation>King Abdulaziz University</affiliation>
       <role>
           <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
       </role>
    </name>
        <name type="personal">
       <namePart type="given">Helmy</namePart>
              <namePart type="given">Salah</namePart>
              <namePart type="given">Osman</namePart>

       <namePart type="family">Abouelnaga</namePart>
       <affiliation>King Abdulaziz University</affiliation>
       <role>
           <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
       </role>
    </name>
        <name type="personal">
       <namePart type="given">Faisal</namePart>

       <namePart type="family">Rehman</namePart>
       <affiliation>University of Sargodha</affiliation>
       <role>
           <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
       </role>
    </name>

    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2016</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <abstract>Ground penetrating radar is a noninvasive geophysical technique that can be used to infer subsurface geological, geotechnical, and petrophysical attributes. For water contamination studies, ultimate target, i.e., contaminant flow, is demarcated with the help of dielectric permittivity, water content, and porosity. The dielectric permittivity facilitates to evaluate water content; whereas the dielectric permittivity can be estimated by using the interval velocity, and porosity can be estimated by using the information of water content and dielectric permittivity. All these parameters are interlinked. This paper describes different empirical and mixing relationships to calculate approximately these parameters and their utilization in predicting the hydrogeological model of the area.</abstract>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <genre>journal article</genre>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Arabian Journal of Geosciences</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <originInfo>
            <issuance>continuing</issuance>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">periodical</genre>
        <genre>academic journal</genre>
        <identifier type="issn">1866-7538</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <identifier type="doi">10.1007/s12517-016-2328-7</identifier>
    <part>
        <date>2016</date>
        <detail type="volume"><number>9</number></detail>
        <detail type="issue"><number>4</number></detail>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>1</start>
            <end>7</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
    <location>
        <url>http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12517-016-2328-7</url>
    </location>
</mods>

</modsCollection>

[Chris Putnam]

Sorry for the delay in replying. In this case it wasn't my (just) my schedule, but was due to the fact that one of my projects fell afoul of sourceforge's automatic scanning for sourceforge abusers, and my account was deleted without notice. The kind folks at sourceforge did help me fix it up after I discovered it sometime later however.

So I've fixed this for the latest version (5.9).

But a brief discussion on why this happened. Internally, bibutils tries very hard to ensure that it doesn't carrry around duplicate information. This is because a lot of example data in my regression suites (from real people) have a lot of this duplication. Thus the "no duplications" policy was on for all types of data by default.

Clearly this behavior is wrong for your example. Removing the "no duplications" for all types of data really makes conversion of lots of files very noisy and problematic. So what I've done is to allow duplicated values for authors (and editors, etc.) only. This fixes this example without causing too much damage to other files. Given your example, I think I can reasonably assert that any references that inappropriately repeat a single author multiple times should be fixed in the source file, not in bibutils, as such behavior breaks properly formatted and real bibliography examples.

Thanks for the report.

[Jason Annadani]

Thanks very much! We've now upgraded to 5.9 which fixes our bug.