‘Seed + expand’: a general methodology for detecting publication oeuvres of individual researchers

Abstract

The study of science at the individual scholar level requires the disambiguation of author names. The creation of author’s publication oeuvres involves matching the list of unique author names to names used in publication databases. Despite recent progress in the development of unique author identifiers, e.g., ORCID, VIVO, or DAI, author disambiguation remains a key problem when it comes to large-scale bibliometric analysis using data from multiple databases. This study introduces and tests a new methodology called seed + expand for semi-automatic bibliographic data collection for a given set of individual authors. Specifically, we identify the oeuvre of a set of Dutch full professors during the period 1980–2011. In particular, we combine author records from a Dutch National Research Information System (NARCIS) with publication records from the Web of Science. Starting with an initial list of 8,378 names, we identify ‘seed publications’ for each author using five different approaches. Subsequently, we ‘expand’ the set of publications in three different approaches. The different approaches are compared and resulting oeuvres are evaluated on precision and recall using a ‘gold standard’ dataset of authors for which verified publications in the period 2001–2010 are available.

How is credit given to networking centres in their publications? A case study of the Spanish CIBER research structures

“…The reason is that Author_CIBER publications belong to authors who have a strong direct linkage with a CIBER structure (as found in the WoS publications). However, although it is a valid way for identifying additional CIBER publications, we should not underestimate the fact that it poses a relevant technical drawback, mostly because working with names is very problematic, as their disambiguation is time consuming and in many cases very difficult (Costas and Bordons 2007;Reijnhoudt et al 2013;Smalheiser and Torvik 2009). 3.…”

“…It should be noted that authors and affiliations are not always clearly connected in WoS publications(Reijnhoudt et al 2013).Scientometrics…”

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

“…Further, the findings of a previous study seemed to be inconsistent with our results. Reijnhoudt et al (2014) suggested their original method for detecting publication oeuvres of individual researchers and compared the results to Author IDs system in Scopus. They reported the precision and recall from Scopus to be 87.3 and 95.9 % respectively.…”

“…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).…”

What is the Required Level of Data Cleaning? A Research Evaluation Case

“…Quite some research activities are taking place, mainly by information scientists and computer scientists in order to obtain better disambiguation tools and techniques. [1][2][3] However, the available techniques are still far from perfect (or even optimal). Therefore, it is an important question what kind of data error exists in a specific data set and whether that data error is influencing the outcomes of studies deploying those data.…”