Seed+expand: a general methodology for detecting publication oeuvres of individual researchers
The study of science at the individual scholar level requires the disambiguation of author names. The creation of authors 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 19802011. 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 20012010 are available.
publication oeuvre author disambiguation scalable methods