As I explained in our first post, our Mendeley software client wants to make your life as a researcher easier by automatically extracting all the metadata (authors, title, journal etc.) from your academic library – no need to type it in manually anymore! Sometimes, though, our extraction algorithm may get it wrong. Like today. Hilarity ensued.

I added one of my older publications to my Mendeley library. It was a paper about the European film industry that appeared in Media, Culture & Society in 2005, co-authored by Andre Alpar (you can download it here). Much to my surprise, the extraction algorithm listed a rather different set of authors:

“Wow”, I thought! “Did Tom, Brad and J.Lo co-author my paper? That’s exciting! Except I don’t recall it happening… And really, how much could they know about the European film industry?” So I took another look at the original file to see how these A-Listers had sneaked into the author list.

I wonder why the algorithm left Julia Roberts out.