DocumentsByAuthor

DocumentsByAuthor is a conceptual or implementation-level construct used to organize documents by their author. It can function as a view, index, or data structure that maps author identities to the documents they have created, enabling efficient retrieval, counting, and analysis based on authorship.

In a relational database, documentsByAuthor is typically realized via a many-to-one relationship from documents to an authors table, or via a materialized view or index that groups by author_id. The underlying documents table stores fields such as document_id, title, author_id, date_created, date_modified, and version; an index on author_id supports fast lookups. In document management systems, a documentsByAuthor-like structure may be implemented as a join across documents and authors or as a separate collection that caches per-author document lists.

Common operations include retrieving all documents by a given author, counting documents per author, listing authors with the most documents, and filtering by date, tag, or status within an author's corpus. It supports analytics such as author productivity, collaboration patterns, and historical trends.

Design considerations include handling multiple authors per document (many-to-many relationships), author aliases and identity resolution, versioned documents, and changes in authorship over time. Privacy and access controls may constrain visibility of certain documents by author. Performance techniques include materialized views, denormalization, or precomputed aggregates.

In data modeling and information systems, documentsByAuthor complements the documents and authors entities, serving as a practical mechanism for author-centric organization and reporting.