Author name disambiguation literature review with consolidated meta-analytic approach

Abstract

Name ambiguity is a common problem in many bibliographic repositories affecting data integrity and validity. This article presents an author name disambiguation (AND) literature review using the theory of the consolidated meta-analytic approach, including quantitative techniques and bibliometric aspects. The literature review covers information from 211 documents of the Web of Science and Scopus databases in the period 2003 to 2022. A taxonomy based on the literature was used to organize the identified approaches to solve the AND problem. We identified that the most widely used AND solving approaches are author grouping associated with similarity functions and clustering methods and some works using author assignment allied to classification methods. The countries that publish most in AND are the USA, China, Germany, and Brazil with 21%, 19%, 13% and 8% of the total papers, respectively. The review results provide an overview of AND state-of-the-art research that can direct further investigation based on the quantitative and qualitative information from the AND research history.