Author.MultipleObjectsReturned in OpenAlex Enrichment

[koutst]

Bugfix

Sentry Issue: RESEARCHHUB-BACKEND-4KQ0
Occurrences: 34,649
First Seen: 2026-01-10
Culprit: paper.ingestion.services.openalex_enrichment.OpenAlexEnrichmentService.process_authors

Problem

In openalex_enrichment.py (line 244), update_or_create uses openalex_ids (an ArrayField) as the lookup:

_, created = Author.objects.update_or_create(
    openalex_ids=author_instance.openalex_ids, defaults=defaults
)

Multiple Author records exist with the same openalex_ids array, causing MultipleObjectsReturned when update_or_create internally calls .get().

[koutst]

@claude fix this issue and open up a PR

[claude]

Claude finished @koutst's task in 3m 35s —— View job • claude/issue-3194-20260316-1807 • Create PR ➔

---

Fixing Author.MultipleObjectsReturned in OpenAlex Enrichment

• Read and understand the relevant code
• Implement fix for MultipleObjectsReturned error
• Write tests
• Commit and push changes
• Create PR link

Summary

The bug was in process_authors (src/paper/ingestion/services/openalex_enrichment.py:244) where update_or_create used openalex_ids (an ArrayField) as the lookup. When duplicate Author records existed with the same openalex_ids, the internal .get() call raised MultipleObjectsReturned.

Fix: Replaced update_or_create with a filter().first() pattern that:

• Queries for existing authors matching the openalex_ids
• Updates the first match if duplicates exist (instead of crashing)
• Creates a new author only when no match is found

Added a test that creates duplicate Author records with the same openalex_ids and verifies the enrichment completes without error.

All 17 tests pass.

|