Author profile pages in zbMATH –improving accuracy through userinteraction
Helena Mihaljević-Brandt∗, Fabian Müller†, Nicolas Roy‡
June 13, 2014

A solid and distinctive online record of a scientist’s research achievements
is nowadays a must, in particular for a researcher at an early career stage
looking for a better university position, applying for a grant or a promotion,
or trying to establish new contacts and build partnerships and projects. In
the global world of science there are already numerous services offering research profile sites, such as Google Scholar, Scopus or ORCID.
In the field of mathematics, however, the community still relies a lot on thetraditional services MathSciNet and zbMATH, which stand for a high levelof quality control regarding data inclusion and assignment. However, theenormously growing number of mathematical publications and new mathematicians begs the question of how to design author profile pages for mathematicians which fit the new trends of communication in the era of social
networks, while keeping (or better increasing) the existing level of reliability.
In our contribution we plan to present some ideas from the development
team of zbMATH addressing this topic.

1 Introduction
A highly visible online presence of a scientist’s research activities has become almost
inevitable to advance one’s own academic career, even for a field like mathematics with
communities of manageable size and a rather traditional communication structure. For
researchers at an early career stage, a solid record of scholarly contributions is undoubtedly essential for getting a new job, a promotion or the funding for a new project. A∗

FIZ Karlsruhe, hmb@zentralblatt-math.org
FIZ Karlsruhe, fabian@zentralblatt-math.org‡FIZ Karlsruhe, roy@zentralblatt-math.org†1distinguishable profile increases the chance of correct attribution, recognition and citation of a scientist’s impact and provides the possibility to find others working on asimilar topic, establish new contacts, and build partnerships and projects.
It is therefore not surprising that various online providers offer platforms for researchers with the goal to increase the visibility of their scientific activities. Many searchengines have recognized the potential of such services, Google Scholar being probably
the most successful example. Also the social media hype of making a profile of oneself
publicly available has been brought into the scientific world with enormous success asshown, e.g., by ResearchGate. Last but not least, seeing the need for a global and sustainable authorship administration, the initiative ORCID1 has the promising potentialof becoming the standard author identifier.
In the field of mathematics, there are two large traditional indexing and reviewing services, namely MathSciNet and zbMATH, as well as some regional bibliographic services
such as Math-Net.ru for Russian literature, which offer profiles for the authors indexedin their databases.

Author profiles in zbMATH
zbMATH, known to many under its former name Zentralblatt MATH, provides access tobibliographic data and content information of publications from all areas of mathematics
and its applications. Currently, about 3.4 millions publications are indexed, going backto 1755 and with an annual growth of ∼ 120,000 new records.
zbMATH indexes only peer-reviewed literature. All items undergo an internal editorial process, and many of them, in particular in the core fields of mathematics, arereviewed additionally by an independent expert in the corresponding field. This editorial
procedure ensures a high integrity level of the mathematical content, helping, e.g., todetect maleficent behaviour such as “plagiarism” or “non-sense” papers2 .
The authors of a new publication record in zbMATH are either identified with existing
profiles, or new profiles are being created. The first step of this procedure is solved
algorithmically by analysing the name string, but also additional information such as theco-authors. The post-processing involves also manual correction which is often initialized
through user requests. The zbMATH author identification team receives such requests
on a daily basis, showing an increasing interest of the mathematical community in theavailability of reliable author profiles.
The quality control of the indexed documents and of the authorship identification
explains why zbMATH (and similar services) enjoy high confidence of the mathematicalcommunity, despite the numerous alternative services mentioned before. Furthermore,since zbMATH aims at a complete coverage of all literature, and hence all authors, inmathematics, this is the right place to obtain an overview of the entire publishing activity
in this field, where all mathematicians since 1868 are visible and not only those able or
1

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a recent non-profit initiative to assign unique
identifiers to authors of research publications (http://orcid.org).
2
For an enlightening review in zbMATH see, e.g., https://zbmath.org/?q=an:1202.51019

2

willing to use “social-like networks”. The alternative services are not able to offer sucha broad coverage for the field of mathematics, and presumably this won’t change in thenear future. Even ORCID, the service with the most promising potential to become thestandard author identifier, has yet only 146,064 non-empty profiles across all scientificfields 3 , among which only a few thousand are actually mathematicians 4 .

Figure 1: The author profile of Jean Alexandre Dieudonné showing his numerous publications filtered according to co-authors, source, mathematical subject andpublication year, respectively.

Why is author disambiguation difficult?
The analysis of authorship has to be achieved with an enormously growing number ofpublications and people: currently, there are more than 3.4 millions publications corresponding to ∼ 5.5 millions authorships in zbMATH, for an estimated number of 860,000
3This corresponds to the official ORCID statistics from June 6 2014 (https://orcid.org/statistics).
4We found only ∼ 3,000 mathematicians in ORCID by matching DOIs from the publications available
in the ORCID Public Data File from October 2013 with zbMATH.

3

author identities. The trend of maintaining profile pages and registering at various scientific networking platforms (ResearchGate, ORCID, Google Scholar, . . . ) is quite recent,and still not intensively picked up by mathematicians. Although the identifiers or links
to these services would obviously be a great help for the identification of authorship,
they are at the moment almost never available in the publications. Information likeaffiliation, email, etc. is a rather standard part of a publication’s metadata, but thesetend to change, leaving practically no other information but the name for the author
identification5
The task of attributing an exact set of publications to a certain author based only on
person name is far from trivial, due to several reasons:• Incompleteness: The available data may be incomplete; some parts of the namemay be missing (e.g., middle name, second familiy name) or abreviated (use ofinitials). In earlier years, it was also not uncommon to publish under the familyname only.
• Synonyms: For a single author, one can face a great variability in names, inparticular due to different spellings and transliterations, but also through namechanges such as after marriage.
• Homonyms: The same name may refer to multiple individuals. This is particularly acute in the case of certain Eastern Asian names; for example, in China
the top three surnames (Wang, Li and Zhang) account for more than 20% of thepopulation.
This explains why author name disambiguation is a longstanding research topic withhigh relevance for bibliometric studies and publication retrieval, and why the generalfield named entity recognition has gained a lot of interest recently (see, e.g., [1, 2, 3]).

2 Community input
As outlined above, the problem of author disambiguation is too difficult to be tackled
completely algorithmically. On the other hand, the amount of publications incorporated
every year into zbMATH and other information services is too big to solve this task
manually. We thus decided to open up this process at least partially to community
input.
Experience shows that mathematicians take an active interest in grooming and optimizing their research profiles, both the ones they create for themselves (ORCID, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, ResearcherID) and those that were initiated automatically(Scopus Author Identifier)6 . This correlates with results from the recent study [4], indicating that mathematicians like to be empowered when using mathematical search
5zbMATH is also involved in a project on text mining using techniques from NLP aiming, amongothers, at the extraction of mathematical vocabulary, which could also be used as a tool for author
disambiguation.
6
Some institutions even publish guidelines on how to increase visibility via research profiles, e.g.
Utrecht University Library at http://libguides.library.uu.nl/profiles.

4interfaces, i.e., they like having full control over what is included in a search result andthe way it is presented.
At present, requests to zbMATH to clean up author profiles or correct mistakes inattribution of publications are usually presented by researchers via email, an approachthat is evidently error-prone and not very scalable. Providing an interface to performthese tasks in a defined way is an obvious solution.
On the other hand, in the interest of keeping reliability as high as possible such asolution cannot be fully automated. Hence it would be desirable to include user input,
but find a good combination between algorithmic attribution, user correction and manual
curation by trustworthy personnel. The latter is already facilitated by an internal author
disambiguation interface used by the zbMATH staff.

A public interface for author disambiguation
In order to include community input, we are faced with the task of designing a publicly
accessible interface that allows users to improve the quality of publication data in author
profiles. In particular, when dealing with a single author’s list of publications they shouldbe able to• confirm correctly assigned publications,• exclude incorrectly assigned publications,• resolve ambiguities in algorithmic assignment,• merge profiles that use different names (or name variants) for the same person,and• supply links to profiles in other services and personal homepages.
Possible users of this service would be• zbMATH authors themselves, i.e. researchers in mathematics at every stage,• their associates (colleagues, students, coworkers etc.), as well as• people generally interested in quality of information content (e.g. librarians).
As this list implies, we do not want nor expect users to solely care for their own author
profiles, but rather see this enhancement of information as a service for science itself andthe community as a whole.
Moreover, there are different usage scenarios that come to mind and that should be
supported by the interface: A casual user might notice a mistake in some author’s profile
and just want to quickly correct it. On the other hand, an author or one of her assistants
might want to completely clean up a profile, i.e., ensure that all of the author’s works(and hopefully only those) are attributed to her and only to her, all name variants arecorrectly recognized, and as much metadata as possible is associated with the profile. As

5this can be a somewhat daunting task in the case of established researchers, the interface
should allow for doing some partial work and picking up later where one left off.
To make the interface accessible and easy to use, our goal was to provide a clear
overview of the data and the possible ways of action that the user could take. In
particular, some delicate questions concerned the outward presentation of the internal
states the data could have. For example, if algorithmic assignment of a paper turned up
multiple possible authorships, should we present that fact to the user when browsing asingle author’s publication list? If some item has been manually assigned via anotheruser’s input before, should we allow reassignment (or reconfirmation) of the same?
Furthermore, while the user should get some immediate feedback after taking anaction, it must be clearly communicated that the changes will not be incorporated
automatically, but rather are subject to an internal review process.

Implications for our design
As shown in Figure 2 (which shows a preliminary version of the interface), we decided toplace an unobtrusive box at the top of the page with an overview of the possible actions
and links to the relevant sections of the page. There is no real authentication as of now7 ,but we do ask for an email address. This in principle allows for further enquiries by ourauthor identification team, and may be turned into a real (but still lightweight) system
of authentication later on.
Articles that have been manually assigned before are distinguished from others by
the lack of a green Confirm button. They still have a red Exclude button as we areindeed interested in cases where users think that someone got it wrong before. Everyclick sends off an immediate AJAX request queuing the action for internal review, andthe respective button afterwards appears pressed. We still provide an explicit submit
button, which does nothing but show a reassuring message that the input has been
received and will be reviewed internally. At a later stage we plan to introduce filter andsorting capabilities, e.g., to show only non-manually assigned publications or only thosewith ambiguities.
Finally, we provide the option to write a free text message to our author identification
team, as there are bound to be some requests that cannot be reasonably handled using
an all-purpose interface. In this way we at least receive this information in a defined
way and together with some identifying metadata.
The user input subsequently passes through an internal checking procedure involving algorithmical and manual analyses before the corresponding data modifications areexecuted in the database. This step ensures that the quality standard of the data andhence zbMATH’s authoritative status is preserved.

7This is primarily to lower the hurdle for people to actually use the interface. On the other hand, thequestion of finding a reliable authentication system allowing a mathematician to identify herself as
the author of a given set of publications is far from trivial.

6Figure 2: Preliminary version of the author disambiguation interface.

7

3 Further ideas
For a couple of months we have been testing a prototype of the author disambiguationinterface among different user groups (zbMATH editors, mathematics students, librarians). Based on the very positive feedback we are confident that the public version of
the interface will enjoy high usage in the mathematical community.
Provided the expected success of our interface, we envisage to enhance it by additionalfeatures, which would require reliable authentication. Among the planned extensions
would be the possibility to add comments or to tag the content of publications, or toupload and match additional metadata and sources such as references or photos.

References[1] A. A. Ferreira, M. A. Gonçalves and A. H. Laender, A brief survey of automatic
methods for author name disambiguation. SIGMOD Record, 41, No. 2, 15–26 (2012)[2] A. Fahrni and M. Strube, Jointly disambiguating and clustering concepts and entities
with Markov logic. in: Proceedings of COLING-2012. 815–831 (2012)[3] Y. Qian, Y. Hu, J. Cui, Q. Zheng and Z. Nie, Combining machine learning andhuman judgment in author disambiguation. in: Proceedings of CIKM-2011 (2011)[4] A. Kohlhase. Search interfaces for mathematicians. in: Proceedings of CICM-2014.
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