What's my name again?: sociotechnical considerations for author name management in research databases

  • Authors:

  • Dana McKay;Silvia Sanchez;Rebecca Parker

  • Affiliations:

  • Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn VIC, Australia;The Hiser Group, Melbourne, VIC, Australia;Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn VIC, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Managing names in bibliographic databases so that they have a one-to-one match with individual authors is a longstanding and complex problem. Various solutions have been proposed, from labour-intensive but accurate manual matching, to machine-learning approaches to automated matching which require little input from people, but are not perfectly accurate. Researchers have a particular interest in name management: they are often authors, and receive academic credit based on their work and need correct citation records. However they are also searchers and have an interest in finding all the works by other authors. There has been little work on the tensions between these two needs, nor on how researchers manage their own identities with their choices of name. This paper reports on a study of researchers that investigates both their relationships with their own names, and what they would like from research databases when they are searching for specific authors.