Actually, I think there's a slight problem with this design. The markup structure makes it clear that it is meant to handle refs with multiple authors, and when there is such a ref entry, your "process_record" sub will only return the first author -- then this single author will be the basis for testing if the record matches the given search. So if the name being searched for happens to be the second author in a record, that record won't be returned.

You would need the hash element for "author" be a reference to an array, and then search over the elements of that array, which makes it a lot more complicated than if you were reading a whole <ref>...</ref> element at each iteration (by setting $/ as I suggested above), and looking for $search anywhere within the  <authlist> element.