Why does the format of some author names appear inconsistently?
The data within NPArC has come from a variety of sources in a number of different formats and those formats include different variations on how to cite author names. In many cases the way the institutes delimited their author fields are different. Our system recognizes the semicolon (;) as the delimiter, so if an institute is using commas to separate both the last name from the first name or initial and the names of multiple authors (e.g.: Julian, I., Avendano, P.) NPArC will assume that everything that is between commas is the same as if semicolon has been used. Therefore, an initial may appear as a last name. We are currently working on standardizing the format for names.
