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Publications, Identity, and Disambiguation

NIH Workshop on Identifiers and Disambiguation in Scholarly Work

Denise Beaubien Bennett Gainesville, FL March 18, 2010

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"Until George W. Bush became President, the first President Bush

never used his middle initials," George H.W. Bush's chief of staff, Jean Becker, says. "But once his son became President, the elder Bush began to realize that it was necessary, to

help identify which President Bush was being referred to.”

•  How confident are we that all mentions of plain “George Bush” refer to Senior?

•  Remember that George H.W. Bush had several roles: CIA Director, Ambassador to China, Vice President

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Automated disambiguation

•  Scopus •  Web of Science •  CiteSeer •  DBLP author search engine – query interpreted as set

of prefixes (implicit truncation) of name parts

•  Author-ity

•  improving recall and precision over time!

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Scopus – snapshot from 2007 2007 – one solid cluster, 6 ambiguous outliers

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Scopus in 2010: improving 2010 - one solid cluster, 3 ambiguous outlier names

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Web of Science

•  Their example shows incompleteness of disambiguation; continue using all variations

with and without apostrophe

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WoS Distinct Author Sets – clustering is improving

DIY disambiguation

Web of Science

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CiteSeer – disambiguated (but not perfect)

unclustered items are mostly typos

alternate name resolves to preferred name

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Author-ity clusters

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Author-ity pairwise ranking

Author-ity ranking results

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Author-ity ranking – the bottom super-high probability through 130.

less than 50% with title far off topic

Voluntary Profiles Author (or proxy) created and maintained •  Compliance challenges with ingestion and

updating •  Usually include numbers

•  COS Expertise - 480,000 profiles •  ResearcherID (to be used by ORCID)

•  RePEc Author Service in IDEAS

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COS Community of Science

useful tools

18 months ago

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ResearcherID

author-controlled profile

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ResearcherID - features

value added from WoS – only works on cites in WoS

ResearcherID dups

keywords helpful when present

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RePEc Author Service •  Relies on authors to maintain their profiles and

identify articles as written by them •  23,000+ registered authors and 7000+ registered

non-authors

from 2007: dups & funnies

disambiguated index is much cleaner in 2010

they track lost and deceased authors

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In development

•  Cooperative Identities Hub

•  ISNI

•  ORCID

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Manual checking

•  no guarantee of perfection •  scalability

•  MathSciNet •  Mathematics Genealogy Project •  ACM

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MathSciNet clusters all papers but preserves name on piece

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However…

•  Even the small, discipline-specific database of MathSciNet cannot corral all the duplicate names. – only half of the entries disambiguated for:

•  Zhang, Lei •  Zhang, Li

•  Red herring: how many people only author one paper in their career???

–  about 46% in Medline (sec. 3.5)

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Many people, same name

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MGP -

…

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ACM – discloses the weighting

ACM Digital Library – not quite yet

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After we disambiguate, we can:

•  Link / cluster records within the silo –  highlighting the preferred version

•  Link headings (or records) across silos

•  Analyze / repackage / mashup the data

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Linking within a silo

•  more examples -- inspiration from outside the university/research world

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Linking in Community-maintained IMDB

others born the same day or year or place

links to people, films, etc. credit!

Community-maintained - MusicBrainz

members & years

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Community-maintained - MusicBrainz

please – no “eyes” no “pears” no hyphen

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Linking across silos •  VIAF – Virtual International Authority File

•  Getty ULAN – Union List of Artist Names

•  Names Project - UK individuals and institutions – for benefit of institutional and subject repositories

•  BKN People – using Bibliographic Ontology (BIBO) to aggregate author silos

•  rely on local silos for maintenance

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VIAF – linking across files

authority record in BNF (France) matches these other files

Getty Union List of Artist Names

•  ULAN •  Used mostly by museums •  Merges multiple authority files •  Displays all options and sources •  Guides to preferred name

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name variations

preferred among options

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relationships

sources

Names project (UK)

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Names Project (UK)

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BKN People: uses BIBO

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BKN People: uses BIBO

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Analyzing / repackaging the data

– discover outliers through analysis •  what’s wrong with this picture?

–  run the outliers by human checkers

– use the analyzed results to refine the disambiguation

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WorldCat Identities

more than birth/death dates

the fun stuff

Anne O’Tate (Author-ity) analyze by address

note the fractions of addresses

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Anne O’Tate (Author-ity) analyze by topic

neat clustering, compared to “Topics” with 324 results

analyze – author’s impact within silo

IDEAS / RePEc

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MathSciNet collaboration distance

the Kevin Bacon of Math

How close are these authors?

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DBLP Vis – coauthor intensity

see # papers with coauthor when mouse-over a year

DBLP Vis – coauthor timecolor

see fatter boxes on graph when mouse-over a year

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Features to help disambiguate

•  affiliation (how many addresses/year?) •  email address •  coauthors •  keywords from source or all metadata •  dates - degree years, expected range •  web page – URL and other data

•  caution - what fuzziness/distance is acceptable? differences by disciplines?

Use with care: one author, many interests

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For contemplation and discussion

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Assigning numbers

•  Centralized numbering system – governance issues, unpalatable to some

•  Individual small silo numbering – can be highly accurate

•  Record linking across files – easily accomplished

•  Getting started -- authors could include number(s) with all contact info

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Trustworthiness

•  Am I in control of all of my publications? •  If I’m logged in (to ResearcherID, via my

university account, etc.) and I indicate “these items are mine,” should you trust my accuracy?

•  Have I captured all of my items? – variants on my name –  items I forgot –  items credited without my awareness

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Issues to explore

•  Ingestion vs. maintenance –  very different problems

–  author compliance needed?

•  De-duplication (within and across silos)

•  Management and cooperation for updating •  Scalability •  Automated vs. manual techniques •  Optimizing computational performance •  Long tail of one-hit authors (how much attention?)

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Researchers, projects, products, models

•  Great review (by the Author-ity folks) Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. (2009) Author name disambiguation.

Databases and those who created or tinkered with them

•  MathSciNet •  ULAN •  DBLP - Han •  CiteSeer – Giles, Han •  IMDB – Malin •  ANAC – Levy sheet music •  Medline – Torvik and Smalheiser •  D-Dupe - Getoor •  rexa.info – McCallum •  VIAF - Hickey