  The disambiguation of author names is an important and challenging task in
bibliometrics. We propose an approach that relies on an external source of
information for selecting and validating clusters of publications identified
through an unsupervised author name disambiguation method. The application of
the proposed approach to a random sample of Italian scholars shows encouraging
results, with an overall precision, recall, and F-Measure of over 96%. The
proposed approach can serve as a starting point for large-scale census of
publication portfolios for bibliometric analyses at the level of individual
researchers.
