A heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometrics databases for large-scale research assessments

Abstract

National exercises for the evaluation of research activity by universities are becoming regular practice in ever more countries. These exercises have mainly been conducted through the application of peer-review methods. Bibliometrics has not been able to offer a valid large-scale alternative because of almost overwhelming difficulties in identifying the true author of each publication. We will address this problem by presenting a heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometric datasets for large-scale research assessments. The application proposed concerns the Italian university system, consisting of 80 universities and a research staff of over 60,000 scientists. The key advantage of the proposed approach is the ease of implementation. The algorithms are of practical application and have considerably better scalability and expandability properties than state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. Moreover, the performance in terms of precision and recall, which can be further improved, seems thoroughly adequate for the typical needs of large-scale bibliometric research assessments.

References in corpus (4)

• Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists
• Allocative efficiency in public research funding:can bibliometrics help?
• The measurement of italian universities' research productivity by a non parametric-bibliometric methodology
• Peer review research assessment: a sensitivity analysis of performance rankings to the share of research product evaluated

Cited by in corpus (77)

• Network structure from rich but noisy data
• Evaluating research: from informed peer review to bibliometrics
• Gender differences in research collaboration
• The relationship among research productivity, research collaboration, and their determinants
• Research productivity: are higher academic ranks more productive than lower ones?
• A comparison of two approaches for measuring interdisciplinary research output: the disciplinary diversity of authors vs the disciplinary diversity of the reference list
• Estimating network structure from unreliable measurements
• Accuracy of simple, initials-based methods for author name disambiguation
• National research assessment exercises: a comparison of peer review and bibliometrics rankings
• The importance of accounting for the number of co-authors and their order when assessing research performance at the individual level in the life sciences
• Identifying interdisciplinarity through the disciplinary classification of co-authors of scientific publications
• What is the appropriate length of the publication period over which to assess research performance?
• The combined effects of age and seniority on research performance of full professors
• Are the authors of highly cited articles also the most productive ones?
• Collecting large-scale publication data at the level of individual researchers: A practical proposal for author name disambiguation
• Do interdisciplinary research teams deliver higher gains to science?
• Evaluating author name disambiguation for digital libraries: A case of DBLP
• The VQR, Italy's second national research assessment: Methodological failures and ranking distortions
• The impact of unproductive and top researchers on overall university research performance
• Individual research performance: a proposal for comparing apples to oranges
• Career advancement and scientific performance in universities
• Exploiting citation networks for large-scale author name disambiguation
• Variation in research collaboration patterns across academic ranks
• A gender analysis of top scientists' collaboration behavior: evidence from Italy
• The dangers of performance-based research funding in non-competitive higher education systems
• An individual-level assessment of the relationship between spin-off activities and research performance in universities
• The collaboration behaviors of scientists in Italy: a field level analysis
• Revisiting size effects in higher education research productivity
• Should the research performance of scientists be distinguished by gender?
• Gender bias in academic recruitment
• The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification
• The dispersion of research performance within and between universities as a potential indicator of the competitive intensity in higher education systems
• A bibliometric tool to assess the regional dimension of university-industry research collaborations
• An assessment of the first "scientific accreditation" for university appointments in Italy
• National peer-review research assessment exercises for the hard sciences can be a complete waste of money: the Italian case
• The effects of gender, age and academic rank on research diversification
• The north-south divide in the Italian higher education system
• Measuring institutional research productivity for the life sciences: the importance of accounting for the order of authors in the byline
• The suitability of h and g indexes for measuring the research performance of institutions. Scientometrics, 97(3), 555-570
• ORCID-linked labeled data for evaluating author name disambiguation at scale
• Evaluating university research: same performance indicator, different rankings
• A sensitivity analysis of researchers' productivity rankings to the time of citation observation
• Ranking research institutions by the number of highly-cited articles per scientist
• How long do top scientists maintain their stardom? An analysis by region, gender and discipline: evidence from Italy
• Does your surname affect the citability of your publications?
• National research assessment exercises: the effects of changing the rules of the game during the game
• The ratio of top scientists to the academic staff as an indicator of the competitive strength of universities
• Assessing national strengths and weaknesses in research fields
• Diversification versus specialization in scientific research: which strategy pays off?
• Generating automatically labeled data for author name disambiguation: An iterative clustering method
• An investigation on the skewness patterns and fractal nature of research productivity distributions at field and discipline level
• A nation's foreign and domestic professors: which have better research performance? (The Italian case)
• Assessing the accuracy of the h and g indexes for measuring researchers' productivity
• Inefficiency in selecting products for submission to national research assessment exercises
• A new bibliometric approach to assess the scientific specialization of regions
• Selection committees for academic recruitment: does gender matter?
• A multivariate stochastic model to assess research performance
• Specialization vs diversification in research activities: the extent, intensity and relatedness of field diversification by individual scientists
• A national-scale cross-time analysis of university research performance
• A novel methodology to assess the scientific standing of nations at field level
• The determinants of academic career advancement: evidence from Italy
• How important is choice of the scaling factor in standardizing citations?
• A methodology to measure the effectiveness of academic recruitment and turnover
• Comparison of research productivity of Italian and Norwegian professors and universities
• A sensitivity analysis of research institutions' productivity rankings to the time of citation observation
• From rankings to funnel plots: the question of accounting for uncertainty when measuring university research performance
• Variability of research performance across disciplines within universities in non-competitive higher education systems
• A comparison of university performance scores and ranks by MNCS and FSS
• The spin-off of elite universities in non-competitive, undifferentiated higher education systems: an empirical simulation in Italy
• A new approach to measure the scientific strengths of territories
• Funnel plots for visualizing uncertainty in the research performance of institutions
• The dispersion of the citation distribution of top scientists' publications
• "Seed+Expand": A validated methodology for creating high quality publication oeuvres of individual researchers
• A methodology to compute the territorial productivity of scientists: The case of Italy
• Authorship analysis of specialized vs diversified research output
• How to evaluate individual researchers working in the natural and life sciences meaningfully? A proposal of methods based on percentiles of citations
• Assessing the level of merging errors for coauthorship data: a Bayesian model