Combining Authors and using an alias

Good day! Not new to LibraryThing, but quite new to editing authors in such detail. I've spent far too much time on this so far this evening and have decided it's time to reach out and ask for help. Here is the situation, there is an author who has written a fair number of books and some are listed under Ken Cohen, others are under Kenneth Cohen, and still others are under Kenneth S. Cohen - however they are all the same author.

To make the confusion worse, there there several other authors with the same name(s) that are completely separate authors.

For example, on this page (https://www.librarything.com/author/cohenkenneths), it has the authors separated correctly, but these three (3) do not belong under Kenneth S. Cohen. I'm not sure what I did to mess this up, but I cannot figure out how to fix it.

Kenneth S. Cohen (3) : Kenneth Cohen
They Will Have Their Game : Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early… 6 copies

Kenneth S. Cohen (5) : Kenneth Cohen
King Saul--A Bungler From the Beginning 1 copy

Kenneth S. Cohen (4) : Kenneth Cohen
Glossary of an evolving health care marketplace 1 copy

Is there someone who could assist me in getting this corrected? I'm afraid I've confused myself so much I'm just going to make it worse. Any help greatly appreciated.

A couple of problems here. The first one is found by looking on the right, in the Improve this author box / Includes and clicking on examine and separate out names.

The main author is Kenneth S. Cohen, but the names Ken Cohen and Kenneth Cohen were both combined. I separated them out. Kenneth S. Cohen now seems okay, with works split into two authors.

The author Ken Cohen is split, with many works already aliased to Kenneth S Cohen. This shouldn't work (split author aliased to split author), but somehow it does. I personally am leaving it alone; someone else who knows more can play with it if they want.

The author Kenneth Cohen seems okay, too. It is also split, with one work aliased into Kenneth S. Cohen. Again, this shouldn't work, but it does.

It looks like the problem was simply three author names incorrectly combined.

Do the three authors look okay to you, too?

https://www.librarything.com/author/cohenkenneth
https://www.librarything.com/author/cohenkenneths
https://www.librarything.com/author/cohenken

>3 karenb:
>This shouldn't work (split author aliased to split author), but somehow it does.

We can alias a split to a top-level – here it's Ken Cohen (1) aliased into Kenneth S. Cohen. What isn't possible would be if we tried to alias Ken Cohen (1) directly into Kenneth S. Cohen (1). Ditto for Kenneth Cohen (1). If that helps :-) Edit: your unravelling looks good from where I'm sitting.

>3 karenb:

Ken Cohen (1) was aliased to Kenneth S. Cohen. The works initially would show as "unknown", but then would be re-assigned to the correct Kenneth S. Cohen.

Thank you all. Looks much better, I'm not going to play with it anymore either. I need some more practice with this on perhaps an author that doesn't quite have so much going on. Really appreciate all of the help!

>5 Nevov: Oh yay, that's good to know.
>6 lilithcat: Thank you for checking. It's always good to have multiple opinions.