Finding Authors in Common Across Dozens of Lists

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I currently have publication lists for ~3 dozen faculty members. I need to find out how many publications are in common across all faculty members - person 1 with person 2, person 1 with person 3, person 2 with person 3, person 1 with both person 2 and person 3, etc.

One person may have
Last1, F1., Last2, F2., with an et al after the first 2 or 3 authors.

Another person may have
Last1, F1, Last2, F2, and list 15 or 20 authors

And another person may have
Last1 F1, Last2 F2, and so on.

Some people have (YYYY) after the authors and before the title of the paper. Some people have (YYYY) at the very end (after journal, volume, and page numbers).

Most people I've talked have said to bite the bullet and do a lot of manual work, like copy the article titles into a new document, sort, then look them up in the original publication lists. There will be hundreds of pages of publications, so I'm not too anxious to do this!

Any ideas/hints will be much appreciated. Thanks, Peggy 3/29

2

A sample of the file formats would help.

3

... and your Operating System and preferred Shell.

4

Why? It will be solved using a POSIX shell and standard commands.

5

This is an analytical problem where we need to define a process. Once the process is defined we decide whether to work manually or program a computer to do the task. The core of this process involves defining a common index key. If you cannot define a common index key the task is impossible.
You may find that one user is more organised than the rest and has a good index key which can be used to index all the publications. Failing that it is up to you to define a universal index key.
Once all documents can be indexed by the same index key the task is feasible.

The choice of software is a secondary issue (cfajohnson please note).

Echoing previous correspondents, please do provide sample data.

6

I apologize for not including more information! Here are 2 examples of the same citation in different formats. It is probably impossible to find a standard key across all of these CVs; I thought maybe I could insert a tab before and after the date where the date is after the authors, dump everything into a SQL table, and then see what sorting on the journal article did.

Examples:
Zandi, P.P., Z�llner, S,, Avramopoulos, D., Willour, V.L., Qin, Z.S., Burmeister, M., Miao, K., Gopalakrishnan, S., Potash, J.B., DePaulo, J.R., McInnis, M.G. Family - based SNP Association Study on 8q24 in Bipolar Disorder. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychatr Genet. 147B(5): 612-618, 2008

versus

   Zandi PP, Z�llner S, Avramopoulos D, Willour VL,  Qin ZS, Burmeister  M, Miao K, Gopalakrishnan S, Potash JB, DePaulo JR, McInnis MG. \(2007\) Family-based SNP association study on 8q24 in bipolar disorder. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics. E Pub ahead of publication.