Help:How to record an alternate name

There are two related situations in which you might want to connect two independent author records.

1. Suppose you see a title record for a story by Edward P. Bradbury, and you happen to know that this is one of Michael Moorcock's pseudonyms. If the ISFDB does not show "Edward P. Bradbury" as being a pseudonym of Michael Moorcock, you should enter this information. This page tells you how to do this.
2. Suppose an author has some records entered incorrectly in the database: for example, some records for "S. P. Somtow" might be entered as "S. Somtow", but the latter is incorrect as the publications in question in fact listed the author as "S. P. Somtow". In this case, you could change each publication record, one by one, but it would be more convenient to simply tell the ISFDB to merge all these records under "S. P. Somtow". To do this, see the merge author help page.

The ISFDB doesn't currently have the ability to say "'Joe Author' is a pseudonym of 'Fred Realname'". If this were possible, it would lead to some problems, since it would be dangerous in cases where "Joe Author" is in fact a pseudonym used by multiple people. This is less common than it once was, but it still occurs.

However, it is still possible to tell the ISFDB about pseudonyms -- you just have to do it on a title by title basis. Here are the steps.

1. First be sure that the title you are looking at really was a pseudonym. You need to have a reliable source for this. The best source is a statement by the author somewhere that "Joe Author" is their pseudonym. You can also use sf encyclopaedias and other reference works.
2. Once you're confident that a title was written pseudonymously, take a look in the ISFDB to see how it is currently recorded. For example, you can look up Heinlein's "We Also Walk Dogs", which was originally published under the pseudonym "Anson MacDonald", in Astounding. A title search will return two records; one by Anson MacDonald, the other by Heinlein. If you click on Anson MacDonald's name, and then on "Short works" you'll see the story listed there. Clicking on the stories, instead, gives you slightly different results depending on which version you click on. If you click on the Heinlein version, you'll see a display of that title, with a note saying that the story has a variant title, and showing that it was published in 1941 as by "Anson MacDonald". If you click on the Heinlein version, the same list of publications is displayed, but the page says that this is a variant title, and provides a link to the Heinlein version. So in this case, the link to the pseudonym is made, and you don't need to do anything -- the ISFDB understands that the Anson MacDonald version is a variant of the Heinlein version, and hence understands that "Anson MacDonald" is a pseudonym for Heinlein.
3. If you find that the ISFDB does not know about the pseudonym you are considering, then you can go ahead and enter it. To do this, you simply make the pseudonymous version of the title a variant of the canonical, or standard, version. See How to record a variant title for a step-by-step guide on how to do this.