Merging authors

[ghostwheel]

I just moved my library over to Bookends.
I noticed the following problem: Some authors appear multiple times with different versions,
so,
Lander, Eric S
Lander, E S
Lander, ES

I'd like to be able to join these - and I noticed that this can be done by dragging one author on top of the other when displaying the author list.
That does a global replace, if I understand correctly. So, I have a couple of questions:

1. Is there a way to detect these automatically, like the duplicate paper search?

2. These multiple entries were created when I imported the reference data from different online sources. So, I expect that even if I
merge the entries today, in the future new version will be created again. I think that "Papers" somehow remembers that all these versions are the
same author. Can bookends do the same?

3. I have a couple of cases where the author changed his/her name (congratulations!). In these cases I'd like to be able to find the entries as
under that author, but when citing the paper, I'd still like to give the right name that appeared on that paper. Is that possible?

[Jon]

Each name is dealt with as entered and when comparing them in the Term List spaced and punctuation count. So none of those things are possible. Note that when you do a duplicate search, you can tell Bookends to ignore periods, and for authors you can compare surnames only, which both would help here. Also, when formatting Bookends will handle first names as initials (if that's what is wanted) properly regardless of how the name is entered.

Jon
Sonny Software