Purpose: The ability to identify the scholarship of individual authors is essential for performance evaluation. A number of factors hinder this endeavor. Common and similarly spelled surnames make it difficult to isol...Purpose: The ability to identify the scholarship of individual authors is essential for performance evaluation. A number of factors hinder this endeavor. Common and similarly spelled surnames make it difficult to isolate the scholarship of individual authors indexed on large databases. Variations in name spelling of individual scholars further complicates matters. Common family names in scientific powerhouses like China make it problematic to distinguish between authors possessing ubiquitous and/or anglicized surnames(as well as the same or similar first names). The assignment of unique author identifiers provides a major step toward resolving these difficulties. We maintain, however, that in and of themselves, author identifiers are not sufficient to fully address the author uncertainty problem. In this study we build on the author identifier approach by considering commonalities in fielded data between authors containing the same surname and first initial of their first name. We illustrate our approach using three case studies.Design/methodology/approach: The approach we advance in this study is based on commonalities among fielded data in search results. We cast a broad initial net—i.e., a Web of Science(WOS) search for a given author's last name, followed by a comma, followed by the first initial of his or her first name(e.g., a search for ‘John Doe' would assume the form: ‘Doe, J'). Results for this search typically contain all of the scholarship legitimately belonging to this author in the given database(i.e., all of his or her true positives), along with a large amount of noise, or scholarship not belonging to this author(i.e., a large number of false positives). From this corpus we proceed to iteratively weed out false positives and retain true positives. Author identifiers provide a good starting point—e.g., if ‘Doe, J' and ‘Doe, John' share the same author identifier, this would be sufficient for us to conclude these are one and the same individual. We find email addresses similarly adequate展开更多
基金support from the US National Science Foundation under Award 1645237
文摘Purpose: The ability to identify the scholarship of individual authors is essential for performance evaluation. A number of factors hinder this endeavor. Common and similarly spelled surnames make it difficult to isolate the scholarship of individual authors indexed on large databases. Variations in name spelling of individual scholars further complicates matters. Common family names in scientific powerhouses like China make it problematic to distinguish between authors possessing ubiquitous and/or anglicized surnames(as well as the same or similar first names). The assignment of unique author identifiers provides a major step toward resolving these difficulties. We maintain, however, that in and of themselves, author identifiers are not sufficient to fully address the author uncertainty problem. In this study we build on the author identifier approach by considering commonalities in fielded data between authors containing the same surname and first initial of their first name. We illustrate our approach using three case studies.Design/methodology/approach: The approach we advance in this study is based on commonalities among fielded data in search results. We cast a broad initial net—i.e., a Web of Science(WOS) search for a given author's last name, followed by a comma, followed by the first initial of his or her first name(e.g., a search for ‘John Doe' would assume the form: ‘Doe, J'). Results for this search typically contain all of the scholarship legitimately belonging to this author in the given database(i.e., all of his or her true positives), along with a large amount of noise, or scholarship not belonging to this author(i.e., a large number of false positives). From this corpus we proceed to iteratively weed out false positives and retain true positives. Author identifiers provide a good starting point—e.g., if ‘Doe, J' and ‘Doe, John' share the same author identifier, this would be sufficient for us to conclude these are one and the same individual. We find email addresses similarly adequate
