Filtering publication by author and date

Hi Bjorn,

I see the issue—I’m not sure why the sort criteria isn’t applying. However, it occurs to me that one potential solution to this is to group the publications by author. This way, they will be separated based on author’s last name (with headings between them), which should allow for the date-based sorting to work properly. It also makes that information a little easier to parse with clearer indication when a given author’s section ends.

If this sounds acceptable, I’d like to try it on your site’s development environment.

-Zach

Hi Bjorn,

I’ve actually figured out why the sorting by year doesn’t work properly: the publication year field on these documents is populated with other (textual) publication info before the actual year. Because of this, it’s not able to sort the field in numerical (in this case, chronological) order. 

I’ve also found that this will negatively impact my alternative solution, since the grouping will group based on the chronological order of that author’s published work. Meaning the first group would just be whichever author has the first publication, chronologically.

The solution to this will likely require the addition of a separate field for the information preceding the year of publication, rather than the comma separation. 

The other issue with this is a lack of standardization with regards to date fields. It would probably work fine as a regular text field as long as the format was strictly numerical, but here we have some dates that are just years, some that are month and year, and some that are month-day-year. Because of this, the date field will need to use the actual date field input method, rather than a text field.

If you need me to clarify anything here, I’m happy to do so. Reconfiguring the fields and views isn’t too heavy of a lift, effort-wise, but the moving of information between fields might be a little time consuming.

I hope this helps,

-Zach