Researcher Name Resolver: identifier management system for Japanese researchers

Abstract

We built a researcher identifier management system called the Researcher Name Resolver (RNR) to assist with the name disambiguation of authors in digital libraries on the Web. RNR, which is designed to cover all researchers in Japan, is a Web-oriented service that can be openly connected with external scholastic systems. We expect it to be widely used for enriched scholarly communications. In this paper, we first outline the conceptual framework of RNR, which is jointly focused on researcher identifier management and Web resource linking. We based our researcher identifier scheme on the reuse of multiple sets of existing researcher identifiers belonging to the Japanese grant Researcher identifiers are associated by direct links to related resources on the Web through a combination of methods, including descriptive mapping, focused crawling on campus directories and researcher identification by matching names and affiliations. Second, we discuss our implementation of RNR based on this framework. Researcher identifiers construct uniform resource identifiers to show Web pages that describe researcher profiles and provide links to related external resources. We have adapted Web-friendly technologies-e.g., OpenSearch and the RDFs of Linked Data technology-in this implementation to provide Webfriendly services. Third, we discuss our application of RNR to a name disambiguation task for the search portal of the Japanese Institutional Repositories Online to determine how well the researcher identifier management system cooperates with external systems. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from the entire project as well as the future development directions we intend to take.

Interdisciplinary Collaborator Recommendation Based on Research Content Similarity

“…In KAKEN, each researcher is assigned a unique researcher number and linked to research projects [17]. Each project is also assigned a unique project number and associated with all project members (i.e., researchers), title, research period, research field, and keywords.…”

Topic Representation of Researchers' Interests in a Large-Scale Academic Database and Its Application to Author Disambiguation

“…Author name ambiguity is a well-known and important issue to overcome in an academic database that offers a paper search service [18]. Clustering [12], [13] and identifier assignment [14], [15] are two approaches for author disambiguation. Some digital libraries have introduced the clustering approach in practice to improve the efficiency of author search [19]- [21].…”

“…Thus, the current system requires a manual procedure to associate researchers with papers. Note that we can easily access the publication information and grant information of a target researcher using Researcher Name Resolver † † , which is a researcher identifier management system [15]. Resolver, and KAKEN.…”

“…The derived topic representations of researchers are potentially effective for several applications. For example, we use the topic vectors of the researchers for the author disambiguation task, i.e., choosing a correct author for a given paper from researchers who share the same full name [12]- [15]. An added merit of this particular application is that it can be evaluated quantitatively.…”

Accuracy evaluation of Scopus Author ID based on the largest funding database in Japan

“…To analyze research output at the individual level, the identity of each of the authors of each record in bibliographic databases must be known and name fluctuations can often make it difficult to identify individual authors. For this reason, various methods for author name disambiguation have been formulated by bibliometric or information retrieval researchers (Smalheiser and Torvik 2009;Beall 2010;Ferreira et al 2012;Strotmann and Zhao 2012;Kurakawa et al 2014;Reijnhoudt et al 2014;Tran et al 2014).…”