A brief survey of automatic methods for author name disambiguation

Abstract

Name ambiguity in the context of bibliographic citation records is a hard problem that affects the quality of services and content in digital libraries and similar systems. The challenges of dealing with author name ambiguity have led to a myriad of disambiguation methods. Generally speaking, the proposed methods usually attempt to group citation records of a same author by finding some similarity among them or try to directly assign them to their respective authors. Both approaches may either exploit supervised or unsupervised techniques. In this article, we propose a taxonomy for characterizing the current author name disambiguation methods described in the literature, present a brief survey of the most representative ones and discuss several open challenges. 1 http://dblp.uni-trier.de 2 http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu 3 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed 4 http://www.lbd.dcc.ufmg.br/bdbcomp 5 We use the terms "citation" and "citation record" interchangeably.

Detecting referential inconsistencies in electronic CV datasets

“…Other digital libraries such as MEDLINE 4 [32] and PubMed 5 [21] follow a similar path. Several authors have worked on this problem as well [8]. They use a mix of techniques.…”

“…In several cases, we cannot locate a given publication in the coauthor's CV due to differences in the title spelling (lines 1-3 of Algorithm 2). In this case, our heuristic attempts to retrieve it by using a set of attributes: the Id of the coauthor's CV, year of publication, volume, and number of first and last pages (lines [5][6][7][8][9][10]. If the publication is not located, we use the most stable attributes, which are the id of the coauthor's CV and the publication year (lines 12-14).…”

“…It is well known that the ambiguity in the context of bibliographic citations is a problem of universal amplitude, which affects the quality of services and the content of digital libraries and similar systems [8]. Therefore, by analogy, it is possible to assume that these referential inconsistencies may have similar characteristics and effects in the Lattes Platform.…”

Automatic Methods for Disambiguating Author Names in Bibliographic Data Repositories

“…In [7], we proposed a hierarchical taxonomy for grouping the most representative automatic author name disambiguation methods found in the literature. According to our taxonomy, the methods may be classified following the main type of exploited approach: author grouping [3,9,11,12,14,13,16,17], which tries to group the references to the same author using some type of similarity among reference attributes, or author assignment [1,4,8,10,15,18], which aims at directly assigning the references to their respective authors.…”

“…The first part is based on our survey, entitled "A Brief Survey of Automatic Methods for Author Name Disambiguation", which was published in SIGMOD Record in June 2012 [7]. In this introductory part, we contextualize the problem, present a formal definition for it and propose a general taxonomy for characterizing the automatic author name disambiguation Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”