Review of Author Name Disambiguation Techniques for Citation Analysis

Abstract

In citation analysis, author names are often used as the unit of analysis and some authors are indexed under the same name in bibliographic databases where the citation counts are obtained from. There are many techniques for author name disambiguation, using supervised, unsupervised, or semisupervised learning algorithms. Unsupervised approach uses machine learning algorithms to extract necessary bibliographic information from large-scale databases and digital libraries, while supervised approaches use manually built training datasets for clustering author groups for combining them with learning algorithms for author name disambiguation. The study examines various techniques for author name disambiguation in the hope for finding an aid to improve the precision of citation counts in citation analysis, as well as for better results in information retrieval.